Real Dictators - Joseph Stalin Part 1: The Young Bank Robber

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Joseph Stalin - the “man of steel” - was the party secretary who plotted a route to absolute power, becoming head of the Eastern Bloc and chief nemesis of the United States. But how did a man from the Georgian frontier of the Russian Empire do it? In 1917, the 300-year-old Romanov Dynasty collapses. The communist Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace and seize power. From this band of revolutionaries, a future bloody dictator - a man with an extraordinary backstory - begins to emerge... For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 1903, a young man from Georgia on the edge of the Russian Empire arrives in Siberia. He's been exiled to this wintry wasteland for three years. It's hellish, freezing cold, food and alcohol are scarce, wolves prowl around his hut at night. The young man tries to escape on foot. He gets forty or so miles into the four thousand mile journey before frostbite kicks in. Bruised and defeated defeated he staggers back to the exile colony the world has forgotten him but this man is joseph stalin he will become the most powerful man on the planet one of the most feared dictators in all of history how did he do it let's find out How did he do it?

Let's find out. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators, the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Kim Jong-il. You'll be right there in their meeting rooms and private quarters, on the battlefields and in their bunkers, up close and personal with some of history's most evil leaders, watching on as they make the decisions that shape the world as we know it. We'll take you behind the curtain, beyond the propaganda and the myth-making, to hear the real stories of their totalitarian regimes. In this episode, we follow the rise of Joseph Stalin, the Man of Steel, from extreme poverty all the way to the Kremlin and the Cold War.

This is Real Dictators. Stalin found Russia with the wooden plough and he left it with atomic weapons and all prepared for the space age in fact, which is a staggering achievement in 30 years. Stalin's achievements were astonishing. He'd created an industrial Russia. He'd created a larger empire than any of the Tsars. He'd conquered the whole of Eastern Europe. He'd defeated Japan. He left Russia as a nuclear and industrial power

and one of the two superpowers. He wasn't a maniac. He did this calmly, in full consideration, without any hysteria. He managed the whole process and eliminated all opposition, and he did it over a longer period. He caused more death and more suffering than even Hitler. It's a close-run thing, but I think perhaps he gets the prize as the most evil thing the human race has ever produced.

In one sense, he was probably the most successful ruler that Russia ever had. In another sense, he'd achieved this at an absolutely unacceptable price. The casualties of 20 million people, the suffering of 18 million people who went through the Gulag camps, which were hell on earth. The number of people, families destroyed,

it was totally unacceptable and unnecessary. Stalin's propaganda was extremely effective, and we have accounts of how he would work late into the night developing slogans. If Stalin had been born in the United States, he would have been a first-class advertising executive because he knew, he really understood how to get people to buy what he's selling. He was a master at that. It's 1917, and in the Russian capital city of Petrograd, rebellion is in the air.

For 300 years, the Romanov dynasty has ruled the Russian Empire. The trauma of the First World War is weighing heavy, and there's a dire economic outlook at home. The Emperor Tsar Nicholas II has lost his grip on power. Russia is ripe for revolution. Twilight. 200 communist insurgents hurry through the back streets of the city. Among these faces drawn from all the far reaches of Russia and its empire is an American.

John Reed came to Russia as a journalist, but since arriving he's embraced the far-left politics of the revolution. And now, as night falls, Reed finds himself borne through the streets by the throng of Bolsheviks. The Winter Palace is a vast building set in the middle of a square. The palace is the prime target for the swarming rebels. It's the seat of government. It's everything the Bolsheviks loathed about their emperor.

The palace is fabulously ornate, full of the finest European art, pieces by all the masters, carefully accumulated over hundreds of years. It has 1,500 rooms and 117 staircases. The aristocrats living here have a choice of over 1,900 windows, through which they peer down at their imperial subjects. The light of a thousand candelabras stream out onto the square. Many of the imperial guards have deserted their posts. The doors to the palace stand wide open and unobstructed. The American, John Reed, is swept inside.

Face to face with untold luxuries. The communist revolutionaries just can't help themselves. They batter open the doors and cabinets that surround them and begin looting the place for all it's worth. Glassware, fine fabrics, torn down curtains, the finest crockery litter the floor. One man passes Reed, balancing a bronze clock on his shoulder. Another man attaches a plume of ostrich feathers to his hat. Then someone cries out down the corridor, Comrades, don't touch anything, don't take anything. This is the property of the people. Discipline returns. The loot clatters to

the floor. The revolution spreads through the building. Palace servants stand about in their blue, red and gold uniforms, unsure what to do with themselves. In one room, adorned with crimson hangings, there's a long table littered with paperwork. A government meeting took place here just hours ago. Russia has been turned on its head in a moment. John Reed's story is nearing its end. He'll soon be dead of spotted typhus. But this revolution, the October Revolution, as it will be now, is only getting started. As coups go, so far, this one has been almost bloodless.

But now Russia will embark on five years of brutal civil war. And after that, 69 years of totalitarian communism. Years that will be dominated by one man. A man from the edge of the empire, short in stature but thick-set, with a wry, knowing smile, dark, piercing eyes, a bristling moustache, the epitome of alpha-masculinity. Joseph Stalin. Stalin is right here, in fact, in Petrograd, on this October evening in 1917. Just an hour's brisk walk across town from the Winter Palace, on the banks of the Neva River, in fact, in Petrograd on this October evening in 1917.

Just an hour's brisk walk across town from the Winter Palace, on the banks of the Neva River, the Palladian columns of the Smolny Institute rise into the night sky. Upstairs is a small office, the nerve center of the revolution. Vladimir Lenin, the leader, stands upright, bald head glistening with a hint of sweat Dressed in a crisp black suit, tie done up tightly around his collar In the corner, half obscured in shadow, dressed in grey and green, sits Stalin The news arrives that the Winter Palace has been seized Stalin's moustachioed face creases into a grin.

His story is just beginning. The communist Bolsheviks have stormed the Winter Palace and taken over Russia. But the vanquished enemy, the imperial Romanov family and their White Army, have no intention of going down without a fight. Under their revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, the new Marxist government must fight a civil war to maintain control. The revolution still needs to be clinched on the battlefield, but ambitious Bolsheviks are keen not to miss the boat as government jobs are doled out on the battlefield. But ambitious Bolsheviks are keen not to miss the boat,

as government jobs are doled out in the capital. Among the men vying for a top position in Lenin's regime is 39-year-old Joseph Stalin. His first task is to lead troops out into the countryside to procure oil and grain and suppress counter-revolution. procure oil and grain and suppress counter-revolution. Simon Sebag Montefiore is an historian and author of the books Young Stalin and The Court of the Red Tsar. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Author, Young Stalin and The Court of the Red Tsar The Civil War was a time when the Bolshevik Revolution was struggling to survive.

It was surrounded and beleaguered on every side by enemies. The only way it was going to survive was by extremism, by terror, by ruthlessness. Stalin was a man who personified all those qualities. And he excelled in the civil war. He was high-handed. He was brutal. He was obstinate. He was dogmatic.

And those were the things that got things done in the civil war. And in turn, the civil war formed Stalin. Russian society is being shaken up. There are unprecedented opportunities for advancements, for those who play their cards right. Each move Stalin makes will be carefully calculated to bolster his reputation. Dr Martin McCauley from the University of London

is a Russia analyst for the Limehouse Group. The average person found him very modest. And he didn't speak very loudly. He spoke very simply, very clearly to them, and smiled a lot. Very important. And they thought he was a wonderful person because he was so balanced.

His comrades fought among themselves. And he stood in the background, sat in the background, and waited for the debate to die down, and then offered a solution, which was in between. So he appeared to be the moderate all the time. He was neither left or right, and he was always a peacemaker. And therefore, for this reason, he rose in the party. What they didn't realize was that Stalin was going to eliminate all of them. The man who will become Russian dictator, strictly speaking, wasn't even born a Russian.

In fact, he's a Georgian, born Joseph Dugashvili in 1878 in the town of Gori, in the wild west of the Russian Empire. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin grew up in a harsh environment. Georgia was a frontier land filled with tough mountaineers, Simon Sabag Montefiore. Stalin grew up in a harsh environment. Georgia was a frontier land filled with tough mountaineers. It was the borderland between the empires, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire. And so Georgians were tough people and he grew up in a tough town. There were huge fights on all holidays.

It's a very macho, honor society. His father, Basarian, is a shoemaker. He used to make a decent living. But with an infant son to feed, the family has fallen into abject poverty in recent years. Now Vissarion is a violent alcoholic. Stalin's mother, Ekaterin, is extremely religious, a devout follower of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Her faith helps her endure regular beatings from her husband. Dr. Michael Lynch is an historian from the University of Leicester.

It was a hard life. Food was not plentiful. Resources in the winter were very sparse. And most of the villagers he lived with would eke out an existence rather than live a good life, which is why they were very religious, which is why Stalin, as a younger man, paid lip service to religion, prayed, went to church, because that's how you made life bearable. Neither of the couple's first two children survived their first year of infancy. Young Joseph is their only child. They call him Soso.

Professor Donald Rayfield, from Queen Mary University of London, is author of Stalin and His Hangman. Like a lot of very successful dictators, he was an outsider. Like Napoleon, like Hitler, he didn't come from the center, he came from the outside. And he was more of an outsider than any of them, because he wasn't even a Russian, he was a Georgian. He didn't come from the center, he came from the outside. And he was more of an outsider than any of them, because he wasn't even a Russian, he was a Georgian. He didn't learn the Russian language until he was a schoolboy. And although he learned it so well that he almost never, almost never made grammatical mistakes, he kept his accent to the day he died.

In fact, the accent was the most intimidating thing about it, perhaps. So I think that fact that he was a Georgian was a key because it helped him to pass as a mystery, as someone that other people couldn't guess or second-guess. The Dugashvili's are always struggling to stay afloat. They're so poor that over nine years they have to move between 10 different rented rooms. Derrick Henry Flood is an independent journalist,

foreign reporter, and blogger. He remembers the surprise of visiting Stalin's hometown for the first time. Gori is not a metropolis. It's a small rural area in central Georgia, south of the Caucasus Mountains. It's a place filled with peus Mountains. It's a place filled with peasantry. It's a simple place. It's pious in Georgian Orthodox

Christianity. It's not a place where you would think a world leader would emanate from. So upon visiting Stalin's birthplace in Gori, I couldn't believe what humble means he came from. This is a man that ruled so much of the world for over three decades, and he came from what's effectively a hovel. I stood in Stalin's room, and it's hard to believe that such great and terrifying power came from such a small place. As Stalin grows up, his father's drunken violence gets worse. Vissarion is eventually evicted from the city for assaulting a policeman. Ekaterine takes her son and moves into the house of a charitable local priest,

a man called Father Christopher Chakviani. It's here that young Soso learns the Russian language. Away from his father, the young boy's confidence grows. Professor Donald Rayfield. His Georgian background gave him, first of all, an idea of how to conduct yourself with others. That is, not to reveal your thoughts,

not to reveal any emotion except anger and indignation, to put your family behind you, not to show affection for your wife or your children, always to appear to be concentrating on the main thing, and to let other people think you are actually stupider than you were. The opposite of what most politicians do, they want to appear cleverer. That was how he deceived so many into thinking that he was not a dangerous enemy, that he could be a useful servant.

There's a mischievous side to So-So's character. He leads a gang of local kids that roams the streets of Gori, getting up to no good. On one occasion, they even set off explosives in a shop. At the age of twelve, So-So narrowly escapes death in a freak accident. He's hit by a horse and carriage, and is confined to hospital for several months. He'll never fully recover the use of his left arm. When he gets out of hospital,

he discovers his absent father has resurfaced. Crazy Beso, as the locals call him, kidnaps his son and takes him to work as his apprentice in a local shoe factory. For the first time, the future communist dictator experiences industrial capitalism up close and personal. The boiling hot factory conditions will leave an indelible mark on his psyche. It takes several local priests to rescue Soso from his father's clutches. Vissarion disappears into the ether once again. Soso returns to school, but even there, violence is a fact of everyday life. One day, his teachers take the class to witness the public hanging of some local peasant bandits.

Educational standards are rather different in the 1880s. Ekaterina is desperate for her son to become a priest. Dedicating him to the divine is the ultimate demonstration of her faith. Fifty miles away in the city of Tiflis, there's a school she has her eye on. It's a Russian Orthodox seminary, offering the best education around. The only problem is, only the sons of clergy are allowed to enroll. Luckily, the priest Soso and his mother lodge with, Father Cakviani, is on hand to have a word with the head of admissions. Freshly enrolled at the seminary, before long Soso is top of the class. He paints, writes poetry, acts on stage,

sings in the local choir. But the boy who will become Stalin is starting to lose his faith in God. An avid reader of books, he's discovered evolution in the works of Charles Darwin. Simon Seberg Montefiore. While he was at the seminary, Stalin first of all became an atheist and he became a romantic poet. And his poetry was actually quite good and was published in the literary journals of the day. Then he started to study the works of Marx.

And in Marxism, like many other young people at that time in the Russian Empire, he discovered an ideology that wasn't just political. It was a complete world system and worldview that answered all the questions that a young man like this might have and provided all the solutions that he might ask for. Stalin's mother may yearn for him to become an Orthodox priest, but he has other ideas. Dr. Martin McCauley. He read prohibited books, books on Marx and other communist writers, and he was punished when he was found out. So he learned to be deceptive and to say one thing

to the priests and think another. So therefore he led, if you like, intellectually a double life from the very beginning. And he could also cheat the lecturers, he could cheat his fellow students. He learned to do that. His goal was always to be number one. Stalin was a clever student. He worked hard, he had a brilliant voice.

He always wanted to be number one, and he never conceded he was wrong. He was always right. He had this self-belief, this huge self-belief. Karl Marx, the German social philosopher and author of the Communist Manifesto, is all the rage in radical European circles. Marx's writings open young Stalin's mind to the possibility of revolution. When he dropped Christianity and adopted Marxism,

he goes from a celestial religion to a secular religion. There are those who are the faithful, Marxists, and those who are outside, the bourgeoisie, the enemy. And the world is divided between friends and enemies. And so this Manichaean view of the world continues, and he retained that to his dying day. Young Stalin is extremely bright but increasingly he's a problem pupil for the teachers he admits to being an atheist he refuses to doff his cap

to the monks at the seminary every now and then his father crazy besser reappears asking for the money his son earns from singing in the choir, pestering him for drink. But he never hangs around for long. Stalin's grades start to slip as he realizes his future lies outside of the church. At night, he attends secret meetings of local Russian workers. Then, at the age of 20, Stalin makes a decisive break with his mother and his upbringing. To Ekaterin's dismay, he abandons the seminary to become a full-time political activist in the Georgian Marxist movement.

The organization Stalin has signed up to is illegal. Trying to topple the Tsar is a deadly game. The secret police, the Okhrana, are on the lookout for subversives. Stalin joined the conspiratorial underground, which he was to exist in for the next sort of 20 years, basically. And the life of an underground conspiratorial Marxist was a very strange one. You changed your name constantly.

You moved house constantly. You had very quick love affairs with people and then never saw them again. You could trust nobody. The Tsarist secret police was gradually infiltrating all these conspiratorial revolutionary parties. And so you could trust absolutely nobody. But it was a very exciting life.

It was partly clandestine, covert activity. You were agitating among workers. You were printing out pamphlets. You were trying to turn other people into double agents for you. You were chased by the police. Everything in it was political, and everything in it forwarded the cause of Marxism, and that's what Stalin cared about. Full of idealism, Stalin adopts the codename Koba, after a Georgian Robin Hood, and begins to organise industrial workers to destabilise the Tsarist regime. Stalin had always followed Lenin's dictum,

the worse the better. And that meant the more blood shed, the more suffering, the more misery among the workers, the better for the cause of Marxism and revolution. Stalin cared little for individuals' lives. He was interested in the great movements of history, the dialectical materialism, the struggle. And therefore, he cared little if people were killed in riots or actions or bank robberies. He went to Batumi, which was an oil terminus on the Black Sea,

and there were thousands of workers worked there. And Stalin immediately arranged a series of strikes. It is here, in Batumi, that Stalin gets his first real taste for blood. In 1902, his strikers confront the authorities. The police open fire, killing 15 protesters and injuring many more. Stalin is not involved in the actual fighting, but he does tend to the wounded. This was a sort of massacre. And following the dictum, the worse the better, Stalin was delighted because this was his first revolutionary blooding, if you like, and it showed that he had the czarists in effect on the run. Neither the street violence nor the resulting death toll worry Stalin one bit. In fact,

they teach him a lesson he will never forget. Dr. Michael Lynch. There are suggestions that the strike is like an epiphany for him, that he saw in the act of violence the way forward. This is how you do it. You may be suppressed. It may not succeed as a strike. It may be broken as it was in this instance. People may die. But that is how you change Russia. That's how you progress the revolutionary movement. You can't do it through negotiation, discussion. Propaganda's there. You've got to use that. But physical violence is of the essence. You've got to be prepared to use it. If you're not prepared to use it,

cease being a revolutionary. I think that strike occasion convinces him that violence is the necessity that he must adhere to in advancing the cause of revolution. Physical violence has always been part of Stalin's life. His mother loved him dearly, but beat him severely. On the streets of his hometown of Gori, mounted police used to whip passers-by for the slightest infractions. And, of course, his father, Crazy Beso, used to lash him at the belt. Causing trouble on the streets of Georgia, Stalin can't escape the attention of the authorities forever.

In July 1903, he gets a huge reality check. He's arrested and sentenced to three years of exile in eastern Siberia. In October that year, Stalin boards a prison steamship bound for Yakutsk province, 4,000 miles from home. He arrives in Siberia six weeks later, at the end of November. He'll sleep in a larder in a small house belonging to a local peasant. This part of Siberia has plenty of other left-wing exiles. But they don't interest Stalin.

He'd rather drink with the local petty criminals. He's in exile, but hardly under close guard. Marooned in the back of beyond, the banished prisoners are largely left to their own devices. There's no one training a gun on them. They're free to strike out for freedom, if they want to risk it. Life in remote Siberia wears thin pretty quick, so Stalin tries to escape. On a cold December night, the young Georgian dons his traditional chocker coat and voyages into the vast snowy desert. What exactly happens next is clouded in myth. Stalin

will spin and re-spin this tale countless times in the years to come. In any case, from what we can work out, it is a remarkable story. With just a few scraps of bread in his possession, he covers just 46 miles of the 4,000 mile journey before admitting defeat. With temperatures plummeting, Stalin seeks out shelter by knocking on the door of a small, dilapidated wooden hut. The hut's owner, a man called Abram Guzinski, will never forget welcoming in the ice-coated visitor from the mine as thirty frosts. He's certainly not dressed for the conditions.

His nose and ears are showing signs of frostbite. He's not even wearing gloves. Having barely made a dent in his journey, the next morning Stalin returns, exhausted, to the frontier town he'd been exiled to. He rests up, regains his strength, and sets about gathering the items necessary to make a proper go of it. After several weeks the young man sets out once again. This time he's dressed for the weather, in a thick fur coat. He has a handful of coins to pay his way, and a small saber sword in case he runs into trouble. With the sword, Stalin threatens a drunken sledge driver. He forces him to take him to the nearest train station.

For the next few weeks, Stalin will set about bribing his way onto a succession of trains and ships. Eventually he makes it back home, to the city of Tiflis. He picks up right where he left off. He heads up workers' meetings all over Georgia, debating fiercely with rivals over the future direction of the party. He edits a Marxist newspaper, The Proletarian Struggle. He establishes Bolshevik strongholds in mining towns and industrial areas. He forms local battle squads,

using gangs to violently disrupt meetings of the liberal bourgeoisie. He's making quite a name for himself. meetings of the liberal bourgeoisie. He's making quite a name for himself. In November 1905, Stalin is elected by his fellow Georgian communists to represent them at a Bolshevik conference. Here, he will finally meet the great leader, Vladimir Lenin, the man Stalin considers to be the mountain eagle of the revolution. the man Stalin considers to be the mountain eagle of the revolution. The two men come face to face for the first time. It's the beginning of an association that will shape modern Russia.

Lenin sees in Stalin a man of loyalty, a man committed to the cause as Lenin defines it, and a man who's prepared to develop the ideas that Lenin puts to him, to write about them, to develop them in philosophical terms, to present them in party terms to the other members, and to do the dirty work of hard admin, of keeping checks on all the members, keeping records, dull work, but necessary work in a growing movement. And Lenin entrusts Stalin to do that.

And Stalin shows from the beginning intense loyalty to Lenin. There's no example, I think, at all in Stalin's career of ever being disloyal directly to Lenin. He always followed orders. He always obeyed. He does challenge on points of policy later, but he's never openly, directly disloyal to Lenin. And Lenin saw in him a great advocate for the cause. He called him once the great Georgian. He meant by that a man who could liaise with the nationalities. Because when we get into power, and that was their ultimate ambition, of course,

Russia is only 50% Russian. The other nationalities have got to be catered for. How do we do that? We want somebody who understands. So this Georgian is the key man. Lenin entrusts Stalin with a vital mission, raising money for the revolution. At Lenin's behest, Stalin travels to the booming port town of Baku in modern-day Azerbaijan. Far from the center of Zara's power, Baku is ripe for plundering. Far from the center of Zara's power, Baku is ripe for plundering. It's full of wealthy oil barons. Stalin becomes what can only be described as a mobster. He and his enforcers set about fleecing the Baku oil capitalists for all they're worth.

And that meant bank robberies, piracy, protection rackets, kidnapping rich men's children. And in Baku, which was the oil city where a half of the world's oil at that time was being pumped out, it was an extraordinary place full of millionaires, full of self-made men. The city was black, which is why it was called the Black City. Oil just bubbled out of it. It was filled with every nationality you could imagine.

It was a sort of Tower of Babel, if you like, mixed with Babylon. And Stalin ran a gang there that was called something like The Outfit. And they did all these things. They were a pretty motley bunch. Stalin was prepared to use practically anything, A, to obtain money, and B, to obtain the freedom to publish. Therefore, money became a vital necessity.

They condemned it in their Marxist way as being corrupt, but they needed money. How do you make money? Well, you steal it or you make it illegally, because there's no legal way of doing it in the amount you need. So there are stories which seem to be substantiated. He ran brothels, more than one, using willing party workers, the women to start with,

raising funds in that way. He engages in theft, he engages in trade robbery, and he is prepared to use whatever means are available as a money-raising activity. They also get funded from abroad. Again, this hushed up later, but we know that some of the German revolutionaries were funding Russia.

Money even coming from France, it seems. Everything for Stalin was political. And Lenin asked him to do these expropriations, to raise money for the Bolshevik party. So he set about organizing, wherever possible, piracy to hold up ships, protection rackets to raise money from millionaires, and of course, bank robberies. I mean, his greatest bank robbery was in June 1907 in Tiflis, where they held up the stagecoach that was carrying the money to pay all the workers in Georgia. And they held it up. They threw grenades underneath the stagecoach,

which was being pulled by horses. The horses went crazy. They threw grenades all round the square when they were having this huge heist. Something like 50 people were killed, but they got away with hundreds of thousands of rubles, the equivalent today of tens of millions, probably. Stalin is lifting whole plays straight from the mafioso's playbook.

The law does not matter. Lives do not matter. Making money for the revolution matters. Anything else is a complete irrelevance. By July 1906, Stalin is high up on the secret police's most wanted list. But he's not yet fully morphed into the murderous sociopath that he will eventually become. In fact, he's in love. Her name is Ekaterina Svanidze. He calls her Kato. Her brother was Stalin's landlord. That's how they met. She's intelligent and well-educated, and more than willing to lend a hand tending to the wounded revolutionaries or circulating communist pamphlets.

Rosamund Richardson is a journalist and author of The Long Shadow, Inside Stalin's Family. She was very much like his mother. She was very religious. She didn't really believe in politics. She was what the Georgians called a baba. She was the woman who was at home and just provided the creature comforts and was the feminine ideal. Cato bears Stalin a son, Yakov. But just months later, their family life in Baku, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, is shattered. Cato contracts typhus, most likely from contaminated water. She dies just three weeks

later. When Stalin's first wife died, he was absolutely shattered. He said, she broke my heart, she melted my stony heart, and with her died all feelings for people. So you could see this as the beginning of something which is writ large later in his dealings with everybody. He definitely loved her and was hardened afterwards, and I think he saw it as a kind of betrayal, a betrayal of life, of love, of trust even, because she was meant to be there for him, like his mother always had been, and suddenly she wasn't there anymore,

nor was his God, he had given up God as well. So he was a very shattered man after his wife died. Now the shutters start to come down. Stalin decides that no one will truly be allowed into his heart again. This decision will come to define his rise to power. Since 1905, the regime of Tsar Nicholas II has been on the rocks. A wave of strikes and unmitigated economic chaos threaten the very foundations of imperial rule. Now, in a small concession to democracy,

the Tsar sets up a parliament called the Duma. It opens for the first time in April 1906. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, spots an opportunity. The struggle against the system will continue in all its guises, many illegal. But at the same time, winning seats in the parliament is an opportunity to legitimize the struggle and demonstrate the popularity of the left for all the empire to see. Stalin's good friend, Roman Malinovsky, becomes the leader of the Bolsheviks in the Duma. Then, recognizing all his hard work in Baku, Lenin invites Stalin to serve on the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. It's a big promotion, one befitting a rebrand.

This is the moment the man born and raised as Joseph Dugashvili, so-so to his family, formally changes his name. For the first time, officially, he becomes Joseph Stalin. Stalin means steel in Russian. It's a moniker that befits this mobster politician. It's a moniker that befits this mobster politician. In 1912, keen to get closer to the action, Stalin arrives in the Russian capital, looking for a safe base for his illicit money-making operations. Duma leader Roman Malinovsky is top of his list of people to see. Stalin likes Malinovsky and trusts him.

A big mistake. The Tsar's secret police was brilliant at infiltrating the revolutionary parties, including the Bolsheviks. And they were so successful that the head of the Bolshevik party in the Duma, the parliament, Malinovsky, was in fact a Tsar's secret agent. And when he was accused of being a secret agent, Stalin and Lenin, who were themselves paranoid and counted themselves as experts at spotting any traitors, were outraged and defended this man as the loyalist, most decent Bolshevik. It turns out Roman Malinovsky is the most highly paid double agent the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, have ever had.

Malinovsky invites Stalin to a fundraising dinner. Stalin is a wanted man in the capital. Showing his face in public is a dangerous prospect. But he trusts his friend. He agrees to go. Malinovsky must have been a very, very good actor so as to carry it off, to convince Stalin to come, to be trapped in that way.

He must have been very, very good indeed. But the Ukrana would have set up the meeting and they would have told him what to say and how to proceed so that there would be no suspicions aroused in Stalin's mind. The dinner is a trap. Ukrana agents are waiting to arrest Stalin. Stalin came to see his friend Malinovsky, who immediately betrayed him. The interesting thing about the Malinowski story is it explains why later in Stalin's life he distrusted everybody.

Because virtually anybody, even the leader of the Bolshevik party in the Duma, could be a secret agent and a traitor. And so he's betrayed by a party member, he's betrayed by a fellow Bolshevik. He's sentenced to exile. Again he takes with him this burning conviction that he'd given trust to someone who could not be trusted. Once again Stalin is exiled to Siberia. Only this time it'll be much harder to escape. Four years in Turakansk, deep in northeastern Siberia, await him. Stalin is desperate to get out as soon as he gets there.

He writes to friends and comrades back west, begging them to send money, resources, anything to help him escape. But no one responds. As active revolutionaries, they've got more important things on their plate. Stalin has no choice but to embrace life in the Siberian wilderness. He befriends the local indigenous peoples. He builds a one-man shelter on an island in a lake, where he spends much of his time alone. He goes fishing and hunting, becoming the scourge of arctic foxes and game birds.

He starts a relationship with a local woman called Lydia. In time, she'll give birth to a son, Alexander, though his father won't be there to stick around. You were in the middle of nowhere, living in a tiny village. You feuded with your other comrades who were there, most of whom you came to hate because there was no one else to talk to. Stalin had affairs with local girls. He fathered children by them. local girls, he fathered children by them. One of his exploits out there was to impregnate a 14-year-old schoolgirl who was in this small village, Kurieka, in Siberia. He abandoned the girl and his children there and never thought about them again. That was the nature of the man, and that was also the nature of a revolutionary at that time.

Stuck in this frozen wasteland, Stalin becomes consumed with hate for those who have deceived, underestimated and abandoned him. In Stalin's mind, there must have been a lot of anger about the way he'd been treated, the way his comrades had betrayed him. They didn't give him his due, they belittled him, if you like, and they put him down. And they saw him as basically a bureaucrat, somebody who would do this and do that, but he wasn't a leading member, intellectual member of the party. So therefore all this would be stewing in Stalin's mind,

planning revenge, how can I take revenge on these people who have denigrated me and put me down and so on. I'm a much more important person than they think and I'm going to show them that. Stalin is becoming as cold and hard as the wilderness around him. He showed practicality, but food was in very short supply. And it's said that every night the wolves gathered around looking for the bits of food that might be left. And so it was a real risk if you went out at night that you might be attacked by wolves.

It's one of the things that other prisoners record. It was a constant fear. If you come through it, you come through it with venereal sympathy for others who haven't gone through it. And it may be that Stalin's later despising of intellectuals and those who hadn't been through his experience is because he thought you need to go through that crucible in order to become a true revolutionary.

It's a powerful notion. If you've suffered and others haven't, how dare they tell you how things can be done? You alone know because you've been through it. The prowling Siberian wolves will haunt Stalin to the end of his days. A number of his drawings and sketches have survived. When he was at a meeting, he would sometimes doodle

if he was bored. And a common theme in his doodles was ravening wolves. Whether that's a throwback, he's thinking wolfish thoughts at that point, but the wolf is a great leitmotif in his drawings and sketches. I think Churchill later said there's something wolf-like about him. And it may be there was actually this wolverine element coming out in him. But certainly it's part of his exile. Yes, the wolf, the presence of the wolves on the edges of the arctic circle stalin has once again been forgotten

but unbeknown to him an epochal moment in world history is beginning to unfold the first world war is underway and stalin is about to be called back west to face conscription. His journey to becoming a vicious dictator is about to grind into gear. In the next episode of Real Dictators, Joseph Stalin is released from exile, but the home he returns to has changed, and he will thrive in the chaos. The young Georgian operates from the shadows, masterminding a string of elaborate assassinations against his rivals. And Stalin's wife musters up the courage to tell the tyrant what she really thinks of him. But she won't survive the night.

That's next time on Real Dictators. Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show is created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Doudel, edited by James Tinder and Katrina Hughes. The music was composed or assembled by Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade. The strings were recorded by Dory McCauley. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. The sound recordist is Robbie Stam. Real Dictators is a Noiser and World Media Rights co-production.

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