Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Stalin: Man of Steel, Episode 3

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

A new mission, a new identity. Joseph Stalin, using the name Koba, takes on his latest role in the name of the Revolution: bank robber. He still found time for romance, though, falling hard for the only woman he would truly ever love. Now he faced a choice: fatherhood… or the Revolution? Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson Writers/researchers: Mandy Reid, Amy Watkin, Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, Melanie Buck Parks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. Here's where it gets interesting is now available ad-free. Head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad-free to subscribe today. Welcome to Episode 3 of Stalin, Man of Steel. It was June 26, 1907. Koba had been planning this day for nearly six months.

He had years of practice robbing banks, and this heist was going to prove to the world that he was the best at it. He anticipated newspaper headlines across the globe, and millions of people admiring his audacity. Koba was hiding in a secret room, waiting to go over the plan one last time. His childhood friend, loyal comrade, and trusted accomplice, Camo, was there to give the rest of Koba's gang a final encouraging talk. rest of Coba's gang a final encouraging talk. The team reviewed the plan, how the women would flirt shamelessly with these stupid police and guards who would be so distracted by their beauty that they'd never see the outlines of pistols in their pockets. How each lookout was supposed to act on a busy street full of pedestrians, animals, and people going about their daily lives,

stopping in a milk bar for a glass of milk or the wine tent for something stronger. How and when the explosives would be detonated and who would grab the bags of cash? Oh, and let's not forget, what do we do when it's over? They had three minutes before the stagecoach carrying the money crossed the town square and arrived at the bank. And the millions of rubles on board, guarded by armed police and soldiers, was going to be theirs for the taking. Because to make a revolution happen, you need money. So as the stagecoach containing bags and bags of rubles approached, followed by a carriage full of armed soldiers and police, members of the gang moved in.

The outfit of 20 armed men and two women were heavily outnumbered, but they came prepared with pistols and apples. Apples were grenades and bombs they lobbed underneath the horses' hooves as the caravan made its way toward the local bank. They glanced at each other, nodded, and threw. The boom of simultaneous detonations stunned bystanders and local citizens, including Koba's own wife and newborn son, who were near enough to be terrified by the noise. As limbs and internal organs of horses and men rained down upon the city square, pistols rang out, and police, guards, and even bystanders were mowed down. And the money that Coba had worked so very hard for so many months to steal for the revolution remained in the stagecoach that one terrified horse pulled behind him as he ran for his life.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. where it gets interesting. The Tiflis bank robbery that was Koba's masterful public heist turned out to have surprising repercussions. The brave horse who fled with the money sadly did not get very far before a crew member lobbed another apple underneath his legs and ended his life. Two men grabbed bags of money and looked for a way to escape but found none until Koba's friend Kamo appeared in the hazy smoke. For his friend's special day, Kamo, a skilled thief himself, dressed as a military official and commanded a horse-driven open carriage. Members of the outfit tossed their bags of plundered money into the open carriage and Camo, wielding a saber, lied to a police official dashing to the scene. I've secured the money, he told them. Go back and help. The outfit flit, money in tow. Behind them lay a crime scene swathed in blood and body parts,

with nearly 50 dead and almost as many injured. The bandits made off with the equivalent of $3.75 million in today's money. As with anything related to Koba, stories vary about how much or how little he participated in the actual event. One account says that he coolly watched the entire event unfold, bombs detonating, horse and human limbs flying through the air, blood everywhere as he smoked a cigarette. Another account says he was hiding on the other side of town at the train station, ready to hop aboard and be whisked to safety. One suggested that he threw the first live bomb.

Other records indicate that the police questioned him, and one officer was so enraged that he struck Koba across the face. Given his keen sense of self-preservation, the theory that he waited at the train station is perhaps the most logical. The haul was substantial, but complicated. Smaller, unmarked bills were more valuable than the 500-ruble notes because the bank had copies of the serial numbers on the large bills. These bills were too big to use at a local merchant. They had to be exchanged at financial institutions. And the bank alerted other banks across Europe about the robbery.

When individuals attempted to break one of the stolen bills, they were arrested. Koba was not caught, nor were the members of his outfit. Most of the large banknotes were destroyed. In 1910, Camo was arrested and tried, but successfully pretended to be insane and served time in a psychiatric institution. He lived a long life until in his later years, he drank and spoke of the Tiflis bank robbery. Shortly after he was rumored to be writing his memoirs, Camo was run over by a truck while riding a bicycle, a hit likely ordered by his pal Koba, who would later change his name to Joseph Stalin. The police were always hunting Koba, but the pistol-wearing, impassioned, and enraged young man was wily and elusive. He had worked his way around back alleys, busy streets, and rode trains to keep himself out of prison and out of exile in Siberia, where he wouldn't be of much

service to the revolution, up there with the miles of wilderness and the snow and the little chance of creating chaos or having fun robbing banks. The revolution needed him, needed his special skills at theft and plotting and violence. And he, in turn, needed the revolution because it gave him a sense of purpose. Cobo was young in years and jaded in outlook, long ago frustrated by the inequities he saw all over Europe. As a young boy, Cobo went by the name Soso, and he was a diligent student and devoted son to a mother who wanted only for him to be a priest. But that did not speak to his soul the way poetry and revolutionary novels and the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin did. He gave up on his mother's quaint notion of respectability and

slipped into the underground world of thinkers and doers, criminals and new world order builders. Vladimir Lenin was born into an educated and economically stable home in 1870. He was a strong student and thinker who, along with his siblings, became involved in revolutionary politics. Lenin was greatly influenced by the work of Karl Marx, and fervently believed that a class-based society was full of ills that only the complete restructuring of the social hierarchy could fix. And the only way to upend the hierarchy was through a revolution, through deliberate, targeted violence. After all, the Tsar wasn't going to overthrow himself.

Lenin was a prolific writer and even published his own newspaper for a time. During the early 20th century, it would be fairly easy for the voracious reader Koba to come across Lenin's writings in print. And when he did, things began to click. He saw how his misfortune at being born to impoverished parents had limited his chances in life. He saw his own atheism reflected back in Lenin's writings and felt vindicated that he too saw beyond the lies of the religious education his mother had foisted upon him. Koba's poor upbringing and failed religious schooling created an angry young man who loved the idea of toppling the social order that kept him at the very bottom. It was easy for Koba to become radicalized when the

promise of a revolution Lenin and the Bolshevik party he led offered him a purpose beyond mere existence. Koba no longer believed in God or heaven or an afterlife. He had one life, and he could use it not for his own benefit, but for something greater than himself, something greater for Russia. Revolution. And yes, working for a revolution was inherently risky, and the odds of achieving it unscathed were low. But Koba wasn't particularly afraid of getting hurt or arrested. After all, his life had been a hard one, full of authority figures who told him who he was and what he could do and what he couldn't be. His life was full of physical strife, first from his parents and later from schoolboys who

made the mistake of mocking his physical differences. Koba resented them all, resented his lot in life, resented his perceived lack of autonomy because he was born into poverty. It was easy for a chip on his shoulder to grow into a massive boulder. For Coba, working for the revolution entailed many things, but foremost among them was using violence, threats, and intimidation against others, usually to steal their money. It also meant talking to others about why the revolution was necessary. Eventually, Coba would come to write articles and edit a newspaper, but in his early days, his was the gritty, rough work of criminals and political agitators encouraging workers to strike. The Bolsheviks knew that if they could get the

working class on board, the revolution would be much easier simply because they had the numbers to stop the rampant industrialization and day-to-day operations that made capitalism profitable to the rich. The working class faced multiple challenges that made existence itself difficult. Poor wages, unsafe working conditions, lack of job security, and unrelenting poverty that left many workers sleeping dozens to a single room in order to survive. The perpetual famines in Russia meant that most workers couldn't consume the daily calories they needed, and rule by the Tsar meant that they would never see any class mobility. They and their children would work themselves to death.

In order to build a new Russia ruled by the workers, the old system had to be destroyed. That was the end goal of the first phase of the revolution. Koba was playing a cat and mouse game with the authorities day in and day out as he moved from one town to another, living hand to mouth and out of whatever safe houses he could find. His luck at remaining free ran out when a police agent infiltrated a group of revolutionaries. The police descended upon one of their secret meetings, and Koba was arrested for the first time on April 5th, 1902. He was held in a jail where conditions were brutal. Political prisoners like Koba were beaten by the other inmates. The place was filthy, and the men in charge were as corrupt as the criminals over whom they presided. Koba quickly

came to befriend and then manipulate his fellow inmates. He had them fight for him, even going so far as to have some of them killed. He quickly rose in the ranks of prisoners, and even when he was transferred to another jail, he was a leader among men. Those who refused to acknowledge his authority were soundly beaten by his new criminal associates. Later in 1902, Kobo was sentenced to exile, a common practice of sending a criminal or undesirable thousands of miles away into the Siberian wilderness, in part because he was such a wanted man and because violence and mayhem occurred wherever he was, in or out of jail. On this particular journey to exile, Koba got lost. More specifically, the authorities lost Koba. Tsar Nicholas, who we talked about extensively in episode one, was a hopeless micromanager, insisting on signing off

on nearly everything. Marriage licenses, exile recommendations, personally stamping each and every one. This in a nation so vast that it took 10 days to travel from end to end with 125 million people under his reign. So that was a lot of stamping. Generally, it took two weeks from the time an exile order was stamped and the prisoner was sent off to Siberia. But in Koba's case, the Georgian police who had arrested him couldn't locate him within their prison system when it was time for him to leave. For six weeks, they looked, even checking neighboring prisons. And finally, he was located in the prison system, processed, and sent on his way. It was not an easy trip to Siberia, and often the journey was more perilous than exile itself.

Travel was long, 10 days that included first a steamer ship and then a tedious train ride, all with frequent stops to pick up more convicts. And it was decidedly uncomfortable. After the train ride came a ride in a sledge, which is similar to a horse-drawn sleigh to reach villages not near the railroad. similar to a horse-drawn sleigh to reach villages not near the railroad. Coba's first trip into exile was more than 3,400 miles. Just to put that into perspective, the furthest points in the contiguous United States from the East Coast to the West Coast are less than 3,000 miles apart. This is one of the remotest parts of the globe, and the odds were against anyone who got sick,

even with a minor illness. Koba, for example, developed a toothache during his journey. The good news was that there was a trained medical attendant as part of the group guarding the prisoners. The less good news was that the medicine he offered was arsenic, which can help a toothache when applied properly, but then they kill the teeth when left on for too long. Koba's treatment failed, and he lost two teeth. He fared better than a fellow traveler, though, who had to have a limb amputated without anesthesia.

Later in life, Koba recalled that he could never forget the sound of that man's screams as they sliced into his flesh. Those who were exiled under the Tsar were paid a stipend each month, with which they were supposed to secure their own lodging, food, and clothing. And this is because, in many cases, exile was not a physical building, it was a state of being. Exile, in Coba's case, did not involve barbed wire fences and prison bars. It meant being sent thousands of miles from anyone you know in one of the harshest climates imaginable. It would be the modern-day equivalent of dropping convicts off in remotest Alaska,

giving them like $100 a month in modern money, telling them that they can't come back for a set number of years, and telling them to figure it out when it came to lodging and food. So we know it's not enough money to live on. They're going to have to find something else to do. There aren't a lot of places to stay. The whole situation is very challenging for the exiles and also challenging for the villagers who already live there. With the small monthly stipend they were given, exiles were expected to figure out how to feed themselves in this desolate place where winter temperatures can reach 40 degrees below zero and the frigid winds freeze the inside of your nostrils and glue your eyelashes shut with tiny ice crystals.

During his first exile, Cobo received a letter from Vladimir Lenin. He proudly showed it around, exuberant that his hero had reached out to him. He didn't understand that it was a form letter, mailed en masse to Lenin's supporters by Lenin's wife, not a personalized message. Despite the thrill of receiving mail from Lenin, Koba found exile rather dull. Because it was. He drank with his fellow exiles as long as one of them had money. When money was in short supply, he could read books shared by other people. He could write about the revolution's goals. Or he could try to find a place out of

the bitter cold that wasn't crowded with dozens of other people. Many exiles had torrid love affairs with each other and with locals, and there just wasn't much else to do. Koba's escape from exile wasn't the story of climbing down a huge tower and getting himself smuggled aboard a boat. It was something exiles called buying their boots, or rather a whole escape kit that included essentials for the long 3,000-mile journey back. False ID papers, tickets, bribe money, food, and clothing. Once he got his supplies, it was merely a matter of walking away

and risking his life on the long journey back to civilization. Which he did. Nearly every time he was exiled. In 1905, three years after his first exile, he had not been deterred from his life of crime. Koba did not keep money that he stole for himself. He had few possessions and his socioeconomic status was barely above subsistence level. The money he stole was used to fund activities that would lead to his ultimate goal, a revolutionary overthrow of the Tsar.

One night, in the midst of all these violent activities he was involved in, Koba was taken to a safe house in Tbilisi. The home was hidden behind the shop of a well-known dressmaker, and the family there had three daughters, and the youngest, Ekaterina Orkato, caught Koba's attention. She was described as a pretty, curvaceous brunette who was especially charming. During their courtship, Koba was incredibly romantic, often serenading Kato, spending time at her family's shop, and bringing her fresh food and wine, which is no mean feat in the midst of a famine. The two were love-struck.

Love was risky for a revolutionary because a spouse and family could be used as pawns by rivals or the authorities in order to harm or capture him. And having close associations created a vulnerability that was easy to exploit. created a vulnerability that was easy to exploit. I mean, think about it. If you have a child or you have a spouse and someone wants to harm you, all they have to do is threaten to harm your child or your spouse, right? And so Koba knew this, but he also knew that Kato shared his beliefs about the revolution. She understood the importance of his work and wanted to be by his side as he did his part in changing the world. office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio!

Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Despite her willingness to make sacrifices for the good of Russia,

Cotto was also a woman who wanted some things just for herself and not for the country. She wanted a real wedding ceremony, not just a declaration of a union that was so prevalent with other revolutionaries. She wanted a husband at home and a family. Because Cobo was an outlaw with fake ID papers, the couple could not have the traditional church wedding that Cotto wanted. Instead, they found a priest who remembered Soso from his seminary days, and he married them in the pre-dawn hours in July of 1906. In the early days of their wedded life, Coba and Cato rented a small cottage, and Cato worked as a seamstress. She created a cozy home for her husband, who in an ongoing attempt to

evade arrest, only rarely visited, doing so in the dead of night. When the sun rose, she would find his side of the bed cold. It wasn't long before Kato was pregnant, and Koba may have said he wanted a regular home life with a wife and child, but he wasn't ready to stop being a revolutionary. These two roles were not easily reconciled. Koba had found it hard to control the passion consuming his life. He brought secret documents and hid them in the mannequins in Kado's family's dress shop. Kado nursed injured comrades who had been wounded during riots or other criminal activity, and at one point she was even arrested while she was pregnant because of her connection to him. Koba had been away from home for weeks on Lennon's orders to

secure more money for their ongoing work. Kato, who was then four months pregnant, was arrested when a secret police informant who had stayed with Kato's sisters tipped off the police that Koba might have been in contact with his in-laws. Kato and one of her cousins were arrested. Kato's family begged for mercy because of her condition, and the wife of the police chief agreed to allow Kato to stay with her at her home instead of in prison or at the police station. It probably helped that Kato's family were the woman's dressmakers, but nevertheless, it was women who came to Kado's rescue, not her daredevil, bank-robbing husband. Kado's detention lasted for two months, and shortly after her release, she gave birth to

a baby boy named Yakov. The happy couple was elated, and Koba doted on his young son until, of course, he cried, at which point the annoyed father quickly handed him back to his mother. Koba continued his work procuring money for Lenin and the ever-present financial demands of revolutionary work. He robbed banks and he traveled, and stories spread about a new pirate who shared Koba's build and coloring, who boarded ships leaving with bags of money. But Koba had a complicated relationship with money. He stole it easily and gave it away even more easily. Lenin and the revolution got the lion's share, but Koba was never one to refuse a friend in need, Even if it meant that he and his family had to do without, he was long accustomed to living in deprivation and seemed to not consider that his family needed his support

as much as the revolution did. Many months they could barely eat. Koba continued his criminal exploits, living on the run, visiting secretly and infrequently, and leaving Kato and Yakov alone and broke. A breaking point came when Kato became very sick and had no money for medical treatment. Kabul was faced with what he believed was an impossible choice. He and his family had left

Tiflis, where the police were always hunting him, and moved to Baku City, a seacoast town that was known for its oil-rich land. There was lots of oil money in Baku, which Koba gloated was one of the most revolutionary centers of Russia, my second baptism of fire. The violence and lawlessness, plus the excitement over black gold, made this location perfect for criminal Koba, who focused all his energy on work to the neglect of his family. The oil created immense wealth for the lucky, immense poverty for the unlucky, and environmental disasters ranging from seepage to spontaneously combusting pools of oil. Straits were littered with trash

and corpses of dead animals. Trees could not grow. The life expectancy there at the beginning of the 20th century was 30. It was such an unhealthy atmosphere, full of smoke, the stench of burning oil and rotting flesh, and gross decadence with outlandish mansions towering over piles of debris, waves of pollution and steamy heat and corruption around every corner. Kato fell ill in this vile heat. She was already undernourished and taking care of an infant, and Koba was gone all day, every day, with business. Kado lived in fear of him being arrested and exiled while she and their son slowly starved to death, far from their friends and family. When her family heard that she was far too thin and feeling so unwell, they begged her to return to Tiflis, but Kato refused to leave her husband.

She worsened so much so that she began to beg Koba to take her home. But Koba had work to do. Couldn't it wait? Couldn't you just rest and get better, he asked. Koba didn't want to leave Baku City and return to the site of his old haunts where he was still a wanted man he didn't have time for another exile so he delayed and delayed casting aside any concern for his wife and child and in that hesitation he made his choice eventually he escorted kato and yakov on a train to her family in tiflis he returned tou City immediately, leaving his in-laws to care for Kato. But on the way home, in the stifling heat of the train station in the poisoned Baku City, in addition to being malnourished, Kato contracted typhus. In the late 19th and the early 20th

centuries, typhus killed millions of people. Typhus was spread by contaminated fleas, ticks, and lice, and outbreaks in crowded areas could spread quickly. Typhus had time to ravage her already weakened system on the long 13-hour journey. The damage was so intense and her body was so ill that she continued to worsen, and she eventually began to hemorrhage from her bowels. Koba rushed back to her bedside, but it was too late. Kado died in his arms on November 22, 1907, two weeks after she arrived home. She was 22 years old. One historian describes speaking with a 109-year-old cousin of Kato's who described her

death. She said, I was then nine years old. Kato and my father got typhus at the same time. Books say that Kato died of tuberculosis, but I can assure you it was typhus. Both got the red rash. We knew if the rash went black, they would die. My father's rash stayed red. He lived, but I remember that Kato's turned black, and then all the family knew that she would die, and die she did. Kato's death would have deep consequences for Russia and the world. It sapped whatever tenderness might still have been found in her husband. As Koba said at her funeral, this creature softened my heart of stone. She died, and with her died my last warm feeling for humanity. He was so distraught that he threw himself into the grave on top of the coffin. How could death steal his beautiful Kato,

his innocent wife? Koba had to be pulled out by Kato's family, who also alerted him to the detectives watching the whole scene just outside the churchyard. But grief didn't paralyze him for long. He made a run for it, jumping the back fence of the churchyard and disappearing. Koba's tunnel vision approach to working solely for the revolution and disregarding his responsibilities to his wife and child killed his deepest love. And yet Koba remained as committed as ever to doing the work to reform Russia. He had no more heart for love or family or for anything other than work. When he leapt that fence and fled, Koba abandoned eight-month-old Yakov to the care of his maternal aunt. fled, Koba abandoned eight-month-old Yakov to the care of his maternal aunt. He didn't bother sending letters or birthday cards or money or trinkets. Yakov would not see his father again until he was 14. Free from obligations other than to his comrades, Koba threw himself into his work.

As a colleague said, after his wife's death, Koba showed great zeal in organizing the assassination of princes, priests, and the bourgeois. Eventually, Koba was arrested, perhaps for the fifth or sixth time, and sentenced to two years in exile. While he was on his way back to Siberia, he contracted typhus. But unlike his late wife, he recovered after a few months. In fact, he clearly felt so much better that he escaped and remained free for nine months before he was recaptured. This time, however, the punishment phase went a little differently. Instead of starting out with hard labor on the table, an official offered a recommendation. Instead of starting out with hard labor on the table, an official offered a recommendation.

In view of his persistent participation in the activities of revolutionary parties in which he has occupied a very prominent position, and in view of his two escapes, the highest penalty, banishment to the remotest regions of Siberia for five years, is appropriate. He was sent back to the town he had escaped from not long before. This time he moved in with a young widow named Maria Kuzakova. She had three children, presumed by her local neighbors to be fathered by different revolutionary exiles passing through. She was charmed by the way Koba entertained her kids when they were running around the house. And we probably all know where this is going. A widower on the run out in Siberia with his scruffy stubble and voluminous hair meets an

attractive widow, grateful that he's kind to her fatherless children. When Koba got a letter saying his time in exile was over, he left her a note saying that he had hid a month's rent beneath a handkerchief, and then he was gone. There would be no happily ever after ending for his relationship with Maria, nor would he stay to see Maria give birth to his son, Konstantin. Koba never met his son, though when he was older, Stalin, at the behest of his mother, helped to get Konstantin into university. Stalin's help, though, came at a price. Konstantin had to sign a document swearing never to disclose who his father was. At Lenin's urging, Koba began to attend more conferences and participate in party politics beyond his quote-unquote fundraising efforts. Some individuals looked down on him, most especially

Leon Trotsky, who considered Koba uncouth and his actions unseemly. Trotsky was an academic and an intellectual and would become Koba's bitter rival in a long-standing competition for Lenin's approval and delegation of authority. In 1913, a double agent and party insider, Malinowski, promised to deliver Koba to the police. He arranged for Koba to attend a masquerade ball slash fundraising concert held by Bolshevik sympathizers, going so far as to give the appropriate clothing to Koba to ensure that he would show up at a place that was definitely not his normal vibe. Koba sat chatting with Malinowski when he spotted the police moving in. Koba dashed into the dressing room where he shed his fancy clothes and put on a ball gown.

He had a slim chance of escape, but an attentive policeman spotted his shoes and of course his glorious mustache and captured him. Koba, long a wanted man for his continued criminal activities on behalf of the revolution, was again arrested and again exiled far north, beyond the Arctic Circle, in the remote, obscure Siberian realm of Turkhansk in order to lessen the chance of his escape. His sentence was four years. The journey into exile took 26 days, and as soon as he arrived, Koba was ready to escape. He wrote to Lenin, but never received a response thanks to the ongoing interference of Malinovsky, who alerted the police that Lenin had sent Koba money and that Koba was

plotting to escape. So the police in turn informed the authorities in charge of the exiles, hey, you better keep a close eye on Koba. He's gonna escape. He did some writing, some professional, mostly personal letters to everyone he could begging for money. And of his closest friends, he asked for postcards of nature. He wrote, In this damned land, nature is abominably barren. The river in the summer, snow in the winter, that's all that nature provides here, and I'm driven mad with longing for scenes of nature. He couldn't escape, but he also did not get along with the other exiles, so he and another Bolshevik prisoner were moved to an even more remote village. As he began accumulating money, police became increasingly concerned that he would soon have enough to escape, so they continued moving him farther and farther north, right up against the Arctic Circle, to a tiny village where mail was delivered by foot only eight times a year. The village was eight wooden huts housing 67 villagers. Two policemen would watch him at all times. An escape was impossible.

was impossible. Koba hunkered down and found a new mistress. This one, a 13-year-old orphan named Lydia. Koba was 34. He had always had an eye for young women, and part of exile culture was casual relationships with the locals. 13, though, was a bit young for most people, even at the time, especially Lydia's three older brothers, who demanded that Koba marry their sister when she came of age after she conceived Koba's child. Koba was not interested in marrying Lydia, or in fatherhood, again. His hope of maintaining a secret relationship was dashed when one of the policemen walked in on the two of them alone in his room. Koba leapt from the bed, attacked the police officer, who turned on Koba and nicked him in the neck with his saber. Koba chased the frightened officer out of the home and down the middle of the street,

and then the officer requested to be transferred away from Coba's detail. His replacement was much more laid back and allowed Coba space to do as he wished. Lydia gave birth, and their child died shortly thereafter, but the affair continued, and Lydia conceived a second child when she was 15. During this time, Koba disappeared to live on a remote island down the river. There, he remained in a one-man hut for months. He wasn't allowed to have a weapon of his own, so locals that he got to know would leave one for him in the woods, and he would set off alone, decked in his reindeer skin clothing that someone had given him as he plunged into the snow, killing wolves, foxes, ducks, and partridges. He shared his

bounty with the indigenous locals who in turn sold him venison and taught him how to fish. He was so successful at catching huge sturgeon that he and his special fishing hole were deemed magical. And for the remainder of his life, Stalin bragged about his hunting exploits and time in exile. Despite the harsh weather conditions, he seemed to have thrived, although he remained frustrated by the lack of communication and financial support from Lenin. He felt abandoned by his mentor and the party, all his work for the revolution, and they just abandoned him here in the wilderness. When Koba's sentence was done and he was released, Lydia gave birth to a son, Alexander.

She didn't bother contacting him, and he never contacted her. The relationship was over. And yet, he heard the news of his son's birth and admitted it to his friends, the very ones who sent him the nature postcards that he so desperately wanted. Lydia married a fisherman who adopted Alexander. The couple went on to have eight more children. Although Alexander knew the truth of his parentage, he and his family kept it to themselves, and not just because he, like Constantine,

was forced to sign a pledge to not disclose his father's identity. In 1917, Tsar Nicholas abdicated the throne. In the power vacuum following the abrupt end to a three centuries long form of rule, a provisional government was established. The provisional government didn't want to continue practices held under Tsarist Russia, so one of their first acts was to free all the exiles, including Koba. Roughly 200,000 exiles were released, but they weren't given any assistance to leave the wilderness for civilization. Somehow, Koba made it back to Petrograd, the heart of the revolutionary movement, where he and Lenin, who had been hiding out in Europe since the Tiflis bank robbery for a decade, worked out what to do next. The autocracy was over. Tsars would rule no more. A provisional government was not quite the desired rule by the underclass, but it was something Lenin and Koba could work with.

The revolution wasn't over, not until Russia as they knew it belonged to the people. Koba was no longer content to lurk about in the shadows, ever running from the long arm of the law, so he readied himself for another transformation. No more mercy, no more tenderness. Those would only hold him back as he learned from Kato. The world looked fresh and new to Koba, those would only hold him back as he learned from Kato. The world looked fresh and new to Koba, who was restored after his long hiatus. He was back, and he was ready for Lennon's next orders.

I'll see you again soon. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks. The show is written and researched by Mandy Reed, Amy Watkin, Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, and Melanie Buck-Parks. Our audio producer is Craig Thompson. And if you enjoyed this episode, sharing, rating rating and subscribing helps podcasters out so much. Thanks again for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'll see you again soon.