The Rest Is History - 160. The Fall of the Soviet Union

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

[Episode 2 of 4] This episode of The Rest Is History marks the second instalment in our four part series on the Soviet Union, Russia and the rise of Vladimir Putin. From the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1987 to the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, this episode is jam-packed full of late Soviet drama.  Tune in now to hear about the abuse Yeltsin received after his attempted suicide, the failed Soviet coup of 1991 and Putin's return from East Germany.  Next episode out tomorrow - or get them all at once by heading to restishistorypod.com! Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor & Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory. We are talking the fall of the Soviet Union. And in yesterday's episode, Dominic, we reached 1987, the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. And how are things basically on the ground in the USSR at this point how is the anniversary being marked is there a sense of optimism of enthusiasm or just kind of disinterest or what's the mood so they're not going well so Gorbachev is um I mean this is such an immensely complicated story uh and I'm trying to sort of simplify it as much as possible so Gorbachev is slightly torn between

two different camps he has the reformers who want him to go further faster and he has one of and the leading reformer is is this yet is boris yeltsin has he taken on that mantle by this well should we talk about him we can introduce boris yeltsin now now we're going to do boris yeltsin in the 1990s in a subsequent podcast because it's such a complicated and huge story and this is an absolutely fascinating thing because the relationship between these two men i mean this really is an example of individuals mattering in history tom because uh i think the relationship which is so ironic isn't it in the context it is the soviet union um the relationship between these two men and the way they don't get along is so crucial to this story had they got along the soviet union might well still exist and the war wow that's a big well he's brought he's brought in by gorbachev to be basically what the kind of

to run moscow exactly he's been in a place called sverdlovsk which is now which was called sverdlovsk at the time but it's ekaterinburg so it's the place where yes yeah yeah and where the romanovs were executed in the um uh in the urals, Yeltsin is a very different character from Gorbachev. Gorbachev is more idealistic and a kind of reader and all that sort of stuff, and a committee man, a man who loves tinkering with constitutions. Yeltsin is, as we all know, he's a bulliont. He's a populist.

He likes a drink. He's great at glad-handing the crowd. He can be a bit of a club. He can be a drink. He's great at glad-handing the crowd. He can be a bit of a club. He can be a bully. He's this larger-than-life, incredibly impulsive figure. Yeltsin wants them to go faster. In 1987, so actually round about the time they're celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution, Yeltsin says, I've had enough.

He's been attacked. He's very sort of sensitive, Yeltsin. So he's been attacked by hardliners, and he becomes the first person ever to resign from the Politburo. And Gorbachev is absolutely outraged by this, thinks this is terrible. And there's this sort of campaign against Yeltsin. Yeltsin, and this is not a story that a lot of people in the West, I think, are as familiar with as they should be.

Yeltsin tries to kill himself by stabbing himself in the chest with some scissors. He's taken to hospital and basically when he's in hospital being pumped full of drugs uh because people say he's gone mad and had a nervous breakdown uh gorbachev says you have to come to a party meeting moscow party meeting to be richly humiliated um this is so dostoevsky and he is i mean they take they pump him full of drugs. He comes out of hospital and he has to sit there while everybody else says, Boris Nikolaevich, you're a capitalist running dog or whatever they're saying. And he has to take it and he never forgives Gorbachev.

It's like the Brothers Karamazov. It is. It is. And he's determined, of course, to get his revenge. And that plays such a big part. Yeltsin feels completely and utterly humiliated. So he's out of the Politburo. Yeah, but he's not being kicked out of politics.

So he's still lurking around. Yes, exactly. He's still in the Communist Party. He's still sort of drifting around in political life. Now, the economic reforms are not going well at all. So you get the queues. They've always been queues, but they're getting longer and longer.

There are shortages in the shops. There's also more and more problems in the other republics, kind of demonstrations and all this sort of stuff. And Dominic, is this, both with Perestroika, so the reorganization

and Glasnost opening, is this because Gorbachev by 87, 88 is essentially, he's reached a kind of halfway house where he doesn't have the benefits of either. Exactly, Tom. Exactly. I mean, how often have you seen this with kind of Roman emperors or with kings or medieval kings that they, you have to choose. And Gorbachev thinks I have to keep my sort of foot in both camps he also to his credit in some ways he doesn't believe in violence I mean he he virtually he very rarely there are examples in Georgia and most famously in Lithuania where he uses troops to kind of repress uprisings

but by and large he doesn't like doing it and there are some historians I mentioned Vladislav Zubok who basically imply if he'd been tougher more ruthless if he'd accumulated more power instead of giving it away and he'd been quicker to use the sort of forces in order he didn't do it but he should have done it well that's how afraid the leading yeah story that's me about he should have been more rich than the third yeah yeah but what gorbachev does is he's been blocked and he says well the way to do it is to have even more democracy so he has this massive thing called the Congress of People's Deputies which he launches the plans for right summer of 88 is this akin to Charles I summoning a parliament

back after the years of personal rule or Louis XVI summoning um people to yeah the states general the states general to yeah it has a bit of that i suppose that i mean the congress of people's deputies is absolutely enormous they're gonna have like 2000 i think it's 2250 members um and from that that will choose a supreme soviet and he will also be personally elected for the first time as president not as general secretary so it's a way of kind of bypassing the party. It is, but it's properly democratic, right? I mean, there's a proper democratic element in a system

that hasn't had a democratic element like that for a very, very long time. So dissidents are elected. There are kind of nationalist figures from the Baltic states. There are people like Andrei Sakharov, the dissident scientist, very famous kind of figure in the West at this point. And there's Yeltsin. and there's yeltsin and there's yeltsin exactly so and and but tom what happens is it's also on telly it's on tv and this

is the first time this has ever happened and the bbc did a brilliant documentary about this many years ago i i can't for the life of me remember what it's called um and you can only see it on sort of very obscure websites because it's basically it was a brilliant kind of vibe if you like tv series about committees this is the one for you right so it's a sort of documentary and um they have all the sort of the footage and it's basically people are you know people arguing on platforms people standing up on the podium and saying you know we don't have enough food or this is a shambles boris is right about this, the General Secretary is right about that. I mean, it is a bit 1789, isn't it? People never did that.

There is an element of that. Yeah, there is. I think there probably is. People never did that. And it contributes to this sense of, I think, for a lot of Soviet citizens, just confusion. You know, what's going on? People arguing. Some people are delighted by the openness,

but a lot of people are just confused by it. And, of course, what makes it more toxic is that it's against the background of this you know the system now has broken the interfering with the economic system has contributed to a situation where in 1989 in most parts of russia you now actually have meat rationing there is no sugar the the factories the fields and the collectives they're they're no longer supplying The factories, the fields, the collectives, they're no longer supplying the shops in the cities with what they need. But against that, by this point, you can read the Gulag Archipelago, can you not? You can indeed.

Yeah, you can. This is the great dissident work by Solzhenitsyn. By Solzhenitsyn. But of course, a lot of people don't. This is the thing with them. I know. Of course, they don't want to read it. I mean, you'd rather have a steak or something.

Yeah, they'd rather have some meat. But also, Tom, a lot of people, if you've been brought up to think one way all this time, and then you're suddenly told, well, what you thought was a lie, I mean, there's a very famous article published in 1988, which causes a huge hullabaloo by a woman called Nina Andreeva,

very well known to kind of Soviet historians, where she basically says, stop attacking Stalin. Because it's Stalin, right? Stop lying about our history. This kind of, you know, these wokest tearing down statues. Yes, yes. Because you said that for Gorbachev, it's all about Lenin. So therefore Stalin is cast as essentially the baddie,

the guy who had come in and ruined it. You know, real communism hasn't been tried. This idea that, you know, what we've been living has been a bit of a lie and we've taken a wrong turn and we need to... A lot of people are just really... They're offended and upset and disturbed by that. They don't want to hear it.

And of course it's easier to hear that when you can have some sugar. If there's no tea, no milk... I mean, what is it? 1989, 1990. hear that when you can have some sugar if there's no tea no milk i mean what is it 1989 1990 in in moscow that winter there is no milk no tea no coffee no soap meat is rationed you need to get to the shop but kind of when it opens all of this and against that background people think well this is all going horribly wrong so that's why by the the way, when the Berlin Wall falls and Eastern Europe, why there's so little Russian reaction, partly because Gorbachev doesn't believe in using force,

it's partly because he's idealistic and he thinks, well, they'll stay in the socialist camp, because it's obviously a nicer kind of, kinder, more touchy-feely camp than the capitalist West. It's also because he and the others are so absorbed with their own colossal, colossal problems. And where is Putin? So Putin is still in Dresden. Putin is famously in Dresden when he burns his files, supposedly, when the Berlin Wall falls. He says to somebody, you know, we need to do something.

And the guy says, well, we can't do anything without orders from Moscow. And he says some line, what is it? He says, Moscow is silent or something like that. Moscow says nothing. And for Putin, he later on says, he says supposedly after he becomes president, he says to some of his men, Russian history has produced two really bad, incompetent leaders.

They were Nicholas II and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev because they were weak. They were weaklings. Whereas his two great heroes are Peter the Great and Stalin. Yeah. Well, I mean, that tells you what you need to know. Basically, don't rent your house out to Vladimir Putin, as we discovered in that party's podcast,

because he'd smash it up, as like he's smashing up Ukraine. Right. So we're into 1990 now, Tom. The Warsaw Pact basically has drifted off. Has drifted off. Russia is moving towards this. The Soviet Union is moving towards this kind of multi-party politics. Industry is in a state of collapse. A lot of Gorbachev's sort of more reform-minded allies have deserted him because they think he's not going fast enough. But crucially,

what's happening now is that the party elites and the people who run the state enterprises in the different republics are now beginning to think, you know, I don't want Gorbachev and this sort of shambolic interference in my affairs. And maybe I should be riding the tiger of kind of nationalism. So you start to see, I mean, obviously, be riding the tiger of kind of nationalism so you start to see i mean obviously you get the upsurge of nationalism in the baltic states because they remember you know that they were basically snatched by stalin and they want their freedom but other in other republics now the nationalism is becoming more and more of a thing and also within russia itself and well this is the fascinating thing.

Boris Yeltsin becomes, in the spring of 1990, he becomes the elected leader of Russia. So Russia is 50-plus percent of the Soviet population. And like a lot of these republics, they're starting to declare their own sovereignty. They're saying, well, we are actually sovereign. We're not just kind of provinces of a soviet system we have our own you know our own personality our own kind of legal we're legal entities in our own right so yeltsin

basically reformer he's capitalizing on people's frustration at the queues and stuff and their frustration with corruption and all these kinds of things yeltsin basically establishes russia as a as a counterweight to the soviet union so for the for the first time you get the sense i think 1990-91 of almost kind of parallel parallel governments they're competing for advisors they can have different economic programs all of this kind of stuff and there's a lightning rod for that, isn't there, in Vilnius? Yeah. So Vilnius is when he does use violence. That's the exception.

Gorbachev does. Gorbachev does. And Yeltsin opposes it. And Yeltsin basically says to the Russian troops in the Baltic states, don't use violence. Yeah. So I think Yeltsin is much more of a kind of let them go. Gorbachev um is torn he he believes in the soviet union um he doesn't want to see anybody anybody leave the soviet union he hates violence but he's persuaded to use troops against the tv station

of illness and they kill 15 people um and it's against that kind of background so you get so you've got economic meltdown you have a loss of political authority you have the sort of the public bewildered and stuff that that um gorbachev says well listen i mean he's messed around with the constitution so much already but he says you know a new change we're going to have a new union treaty. So replacing kind of 1922, which we talked about in our 1922 podcast at the beginning of the year, we're going to have a new union treaty and that'll be signed in August. All the republics will sign it. And it's basically signing up to a new model, more slightly more decentralized model of the Soviet Union.

Kind of like we're reaffirming our vows, basically. Now that's against the background. That summer, there is a total kind of collapse in the in the economy so industry collapses by 18 agriculture by 17 they're running a massive deficit now they can't afford to import consumer goods at that point there is a road not taken um which you sometimes hear talk about in the West. So there is talk in the summer of 1991 of George Bush Sr.'s administration intervening with a kind of Marshall Plan

for the Soviet Union. And I think there is a case that this is a great what if. Because there's a guy- So what would have happened? Well, there's a guy called Grigory Lavlinsky, who's a Russian reformer, and he cooks up a scheme with a Harvard academic called Graham Allison. And that's basically to lend the Soviet Union billions or to give the Soviet Union billions of dollars and establish them as a partner to basically bail Gorbachev out.

And Bush says, no, Congress won't back it. We're not in the business of flushing money down the drain, which is what will happen. The Soviet Union is a communist country. What are we doing? All this kind of stuff. They don't back it we're not in the business of flushing money down the drain which is what will happen you know the soviet union is a communist country what are we doing all this kind of stuff they don't do what would have happened who can say tom i mean maybe i i think gorbachev had lost so much political authority by that point already that actually that would have been money down the drain brutally yeah um certainly wouldn't have said i don't think it would have saved gorbachev probably wouldn wouldn't, might not have saved the Soviet Union either. But it might have cushioned Russia's transition to democracy. Okay, let's take a quick break there

and we will see you after some ads or not after some ads if you are members of our The Rest Is History Club. Whatever format you're listening, we will be back with you very soon. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestistertainment.com. That's TheRestIsEntertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Gorbachev is trying, struggling to keep the Soviet Union together. Does Yeltsin have a feeling it would be better for Russia to get rid of all these kind of various deadbeats as he sees them, these appendages to Mother Russia? Is that his attitude? Some people may think, listening to this, may think, gosh, this has got a bit of kind of a United Kingdom sort of arguments about devolution and Scottish or Welsh independence kind of vibe to it.

Because definitely there are people now in Russia for the first time who are sort of saying, do we need all these Islamic republics in Central Asia? You know, they're just... The problem, though, is that 25 million Russian speakers live outside Russia. I mean, that's the context for the world we're living in now. That it's a bit like, know germany um we'll get

into this in the next podcast about the weimar republic parallels but there's that is a problem uh but yeltsin is i think yeltsin that the sense i get from this a lot of the books on this is that yeltsin is completely fixated on his rivalry with gorbachev and he's not thinking kind of particularly strategically about russia's future in the next 20 or 30 years. He's thinking, how can I establish myself as the sort of primus inter pares instead of Gorbachev? Dominic, it's not just Gorbachev against Yeltsin, is it? Because there are also lurking in the background

communist hardliners. Yeah. And in August 1991, they launched basically an incredibly incompetent coup but i remember uh walking through london and seeing kind of newspaper billboard saying coup in moscow and thinking oh god yeah um again because a bit like the headlines at the moment um this was a headline that could have come from an alternative reality novel in which you know the world gets blown up or something so i'm being very nervous i'm a bit younger than you

my my mum woke me up to tell me the news um just sort of first thing in the morning so that was uh gorbachev being arrested in his dacha wasn't yeah he'd gone but he'd gone to foros in the crimea where he went on holiday and um one day, so it's two days actually before they're going to sign the new union treaty. And the hardliners think this will give away so much power for everyone, we'll never get it back. So they cut off his telephones, they pitch up, they kind of basically want him to resign. He doesn't want to do it.

They form a state emergency committee. As you say, it's complete shambles. They don't arrest Yeltsin. They don't take control of communications. They don't take control of the Russian streets. And Yeltsin has his moment in history. I mean, they've handed it to him on a platter, and he seizes it with this,

because we said before he was a bullion, populist character. I mean, anyone who lived through this will remember those incredible scenes. You know, Yeltsin gets on a tank. He commandeers a tank. There's amazing photos. The tank driver's got

his head in his hands because you know he's basically been humiliated yeltsin has seized his tank it's a great crowd around him he reads a proclamation in which he says you know this is a coup of reactionaries and all this um he he he takes possession of the russian part the russian parliament building not the soviets not the building on the Kremlin, but a building called the White House, ironically, the Russian parliament. And for a couple of days, it looks like the coup plotters are going to storm the White House and kill Yeltsin,

but they don't have the guts. They're all absolutely hammered or shaking or just sort of sweating and gibbering in their various offices. They don't have a plan. They don't have a heavy uniform yeah well they're they're actually if you look at the the footage i always remember the footage the leader was a guy called ganada yanaev and he was shaking when he read that well he was the front man he wasn't the leader he was shaking when he read his proclamation they're all wearing the most terrible suits i mean those suits in themselves are a very bad advert for the Soviet system.

Supposedly, this is the moment when Putin resigned from the KGB. I mean, I say resigned. I mean, there's a question about whether he ever left the KGB. But later in his sort of his sort of, you know, as it were official biography, it was claimed that this was the point where he broke with communism.

Putin. But I mean, whether that's true, none none of us to to side with yeltsin yes well we'll we'll we'll get into how putin and yeltsin form their relationship in the in the next podcast um but yes it's it's just impossible to say what putin's position all this is i mean my sense is that he's not there at the white house with Yeltsin on the tanker. No, no, no. I mean, he's watching from the distance. Yes, he is watching from a distance. So, okay.

Gorbachev, the Ku Klux lose their nerve. Gorbachev returns from the Crimea. And then we talked about the humiliation for Yeltsin. Now it's his turn, his chance to turn the tables. And, you know, again again incredible that this was played out live on television he basically um gets Gorbachev to to a meeting of the Russian Supreme Soviet uh so so they're basically the government that Yeltsin controls and he says you know live in front he says here's a list of all the people your aides your appointees who collaborated in the coup read it out and he makes Gorbachev read it out in front of this audience terribly humiliating

and then Yeltsin just suddenly has the momentum he bans the communist party in Russia he says we're going to move to a market economy you know immediately we're going to have you know shock therapy is looming nobody knows what that means at this point but he says you know i have the economic sort of medicine that will fix that the what's gone now alternative yes very that's right but at the same time this is the point when the various republics start to go their own way so yeltsin says yeah fine let the baltic states go um the the real question is ukraine so the leader in ukraine a man called Leonid Kravchuk, is the classic example of somebody who all his life has just been a complete apparatchik.

And now, you know, he doesn't want, he wants to hold onto his power. He wants to hold onto the control with his mates of the state enterprises and stuff. And so he jumps onto the Ukrainian nationalist bandwagon. He declares Ukrainian sovereignty and he declares a referendum for the 1st of December 1991. Why does he do this?

The answer is, I think, because he looks at those two people, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and he thinks if Gorbachev wins, Gorbachev will sort of, you know, Kravchuk had equivocated during the coup. He thinks if Gorbachev wins, Gorbachev will basically, you know, Kravchuk had equivocated during the coup. He thinks if Gorbachev wins, Gorbachev will basically, you know, it's not good for us. He'll mess with us and our system and our privileges and stuff and our control of all this stuff.

If Yeltsin, you know, I don't want to be stuck with Yeltsin commandeering it for Russia and sort of, you know, him taking it over. So the best thing is basically we take it over ourselves and we'll control it ourselves. And I think a lot of the, so if you look at the first post-independence leaders and all those Soviet republics in Central Asia and so on, they're all the people generally

who are running the Communist Party in those places beforehand. And the same thing happens in Belarus, right? Exactly. And Yeltsin and the belarus and uh ukrainian leaders all meet up in a in a wood hunting lodge yeah in a forest yeah in the forest in in belarus yeah so they go to um a place called belavezha um as you know tom i'm i've been to belarus myself yes i'm great admirer of its chocolate so they meet up and they basically the leaders of these three

republics behind gorbachev's back they sign a deal they'll all become independent they'll have a very loose association called the Commonwealth of Independent States and you know that's it bang goes the Soviet Union nobody in the Soviet Union by and large well 20% of the people in the Soviet Union want this 80% do not want this so this is not happening as a result of massive public protests it's not happening because after years of you know mounting sort of passions and and street violence it's happening largely because of rivalries and desire for self-protection among different parts of the of the soviet elite well we talked about the collapse of the roman empire and the way that um it you know in the west in the fifth century chunks of it start splitting off because local bigwigs start to appreciate that they're likely to have more

authority more wealth more position if they go independent and you're essentially saying it's much the same thing is happening happening in the Soviet Union. It is actually a remarkably... It's kind of barons carving up territory. It is barons carving up territory. Interestingly, I was just reading this book today, the Zubov book, Collapse. He says he has stuff in that

that I'd not seen before. There are people around Yeltsin who say to him that December 1991, are you just going to go and say yes to the Ukrainian guy? What about Crimea? What about Donbass? I mean, they literally say these places. And he says, oh, I may mention it, yeah.

And he doesn't mention it because he's just so keen to get one over on Gorbachev. And that's the reason, not because he's drunk. Well, there is a bit of drinking. There definitely is a bit of drinking. And actually at that meeting, I think there was some talk of drinking there definitely is a bit of drinking and actually at that meeting i think there was some talk of kelton having it carried out yeah not having to be carried out but yeah it's easy to stereotype yeltsin i mean yeltsin is a is a tremendous

politician as a populist as a communicator and stuff and he has had this sort of very stressful time he has been very brave but you're right there is the there is always the issue the drink he's so fixated i think i'm beating gorbachev so they get back it's such an amazing psychodrama and it's it is actually someone should write a you know do a film i know and the fate of you know hundreds of millions of people hangs on this they get back he goes they get back to moscow and they're basically gorbachev's like what and they say yeah the soviet union is no more we've decided to leave. And then, of course, everybody else decides to leave as well. And they say, oh, we'll join this new Commonwealth of Independent States.

And that's all the cool kids have moved on. Basically, Gorbachev is there in the Kremlin. No one listens to him. The army have stopped listening to him. The interior ministry troops don't listen to him. The police don't listen to him. It's like Romulus Augustulus. It is exactly that, Tom.

We did this story on the 12 Days of Christmas podcast on the 25th of December 1991. That's the day that Gorbachev resigns as president of the USSR, that the flag comes down, the hammer and sickness replaced by the Russian tricolor on the sort of Kremlin flagpole. That's the day the Soviet Union ends and the Russian Federation comes into existence. And we did this on our 12 Days of History podcast. But the worst thing about it is not actually the well-known fact that Gorbachev was filmed by American cameramen and he had to borrow a pen from the CNN producer to sign his resignation. A capitalist pen. A capitalist pen.

There's actually a worse fact than that, which I didn't mention on that last podcast, which is that there's a ceremony where he basically hands over the nuclear briefcase to um to boris yeltsin or gives it to somebody to give to yeltsin but actually in secret they'd already switched the briefcases so gorbachev thought at the end of that he was walking around with the nuclear briefcase but he wasn't it had been taken away from him behind his back already and um don't piss off the cool guys and uh yeah so to go back to putin putin is back in russia um he watches this with with horror for him as he later says the collapse of the soviet union he's called it the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. And it is

an extraordinary moment because at a stroke, the empire that had been inherited by the communists from the Tsars fragments. The 15 republics go their own way. Suddenly, there is this nation state called Russia that has 88 different federal subjects in it so it has lots of muslims it has chechens tatars tuvans all kinds of people in the kind of um in the in the steps and the forests of the east and suddenly it's a nation state that feels like it's lost colossal amounts of status and also has lots of its citizens outside its borders. Lots of people who maybe either think they're Russian or speak Russian. Exactly. Okay. Well, so what a dramatic moment. The Soviet Union has come to an end. Russia has been born. Yeltsin has replaced Gorbachev.

Putin is kind of swimming in the shallows like a kind of baby shark waiting to taste a bit more blood and I think we should leave it there and tomorrow's episode we should see what happens under Yeltsin and how it is that Putin ends up becoming president see you again tomorrow thanks very much bye-. Bye-byeishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.