You're Dead to Me - Ivan The Terrible (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

Greg Jenner and his guests discuss the life, times and crimes of Russia's first tsar, the infamous Ivan the Terrible.Joining Greg are Prof Peter Frankopan from the University of Oxford and Russian-born comedian Olga Koch, whose BBC appearances include OK Computer, Human Error, Fight, QI and The Now Show.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.A production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a BBC Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author, broadcaster and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. On this podcast we ruthlessly smash together education and entertainment to expand your historical horizons whilst gently tickling your funny bone. tickling your funny bone. And in this episode, we're grabbing our iron staffs and pointy beards to travel all the way back to 16th century Russia to explore the life and times, or is that life and

crimes, of Ivan the Terrible. To help us navigate the terrors and treacheries, we are joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford, where he works on the history of Russia, the Middle East, China and beyond. He is the author of the fascinating bestsellers, The Silk Roads and The New Silk Roads. And you will remember him, of course, from the Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan episode and the Justinian and Theodora episodes of You're Dead to Me.

It's one of our best podcast pals, Professor Peter Frankopan. It's great to have you back, Peter. I'm so relieved to be back. Thank you for having me again. We are delighted to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, she's a hilarious stand-up and writer and actor who was nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2018 Edinburgh Comedy Awards. You'll recognise her from appearances on QI, Mock the Week and The Now Show. Plus, she also has three different shows available on BBC Sounds.

There's Fight, about Russia in the 1990s. There's OK Computer. And then there's also Human Error, all about technology. It's the brilliant and. There's OK Computer, and then there's also Human Era, all about technology. It's the brilliant and clearly very busy Olga Kok. Welcome, Olga. Здравствуйте. Hello, everyone. Hello. Olga, you're a proper Russian. Yeah, I think so. I hope so. Thank you so, so much for having me. I'm very, very excited to be here. We're delighted to have you here. Olga, your was deputy prime minister of russia right yeah so you grew up in

russia did you do ivan the terrible at all at school or did you leave before you got to that part of the curriculum we definitely did like i remember stuff and i think the most vivid thing i would dare say any russian child remembers is like the legendary repin painting of Ivan the Terrible killing his own son. And that's like in every textbook. And that's the first thing that comes to mind whenever you tell a Russian child, ask them about Ivan the Terrible. And that's a pretty terrible thing to be the first thing in a child's mind. Okay, so spoiler alert, Ivan the Terrible kills his son. So what do you know?

This is where I take a stab, lol, at what you might know about today's subject and uh ivan the terrible is known as russia's most infamous and cruel ruler perhaps the clue is in the name he wasn't ivan the cuddly you might be picturing a bearded evil genius similar to his appearance as the baddie in the 2009 film night at the Museum, Battle of the Smithsonian. Or you may have come toe-to-toe with him as the dastardly Russian general in the video game Age of Empires III, one of my faves. And if you're a movie buff, you might love the Eisenstein movie with the Prokofiev score. But what about the man himself? Was he really so terrible?

Have we got him wrong? Should we be more sympathetic to Ivan the Lovely? Let's find out, shall we? Peter, can we get a little bit of background on 16th century Russia? Because it's not the same country we think of today. So what's the geopolitics of the world that Ivan is born into? It's not really Russia at all. It's actually Muscovy. What we think of Russia, in fact, in Ukraine and Russia, have been pushed back north by the arrivals of the Mongols.

And eventually, a central nuclear point starts to grow up around a town called Vladimir, which is very close to where Moscow is today. By around about 1300s, the rulers of Muscovy are starting to become a bit more powerful. So Ivan is born in a place that is in transition. It's on its way to becoming quite important. It's the home of the Orthodox Church in Russia. But Muscovy is adding muscles. It's in the process of taking steroids when Ivan is born. A Russian taking steroids? I've never heard of such a thing. He's born in 1530, so just shy of 500 years ago, which makes

him the contemporary of Henry VIII. And his childhood, is it happy fun times or is it political nightmare? I don't think anybody born 500 years ago had a great childhood. Vitamin deficiencies, nutrition, etc. But it was particularly tricky if, as happened with Ivan, your father died when you're three and then your mother dies. And the aristocracy, the boyar class in Muscovy, all figure out that Ivan being young, impressionable, and precarious, that this gives them a chance to become wealthier, more powerful themselves. And that's a pretty tough world, I think, for a young boy to be growing up in. So Paulette Levan, his dad died when he was three, his mum died when he was eight. He's basically like Batman. His origin story is about being

an orphan boy. Yeah, and they both have vitamin D deficiency because they're always in the dark. So there's a family called the Shushki who sort of assume control, I think. Is that my pronunciation is terrible, Olga? I'm so sorry. I'm judging you. Don't worry. Well, judge me out loud then. How should I say it?

Shushki? Shushki. Oh, okay. I'm miles off. So little Ivan really disliked Prince Andrei Shushki. And Olga, why do you think he found him so annoying? He called him terrible. No, it was a bit more petty than that. It was basically putting elbows on the table and putting your feet up on a chair. It was a bit fussy that way.

Why is he such a pedantic 11 year old? What is this? What is this? Apparently, Ivan, as a teenager, liked to amuse himself with some pretty cruel pranks. Apparently, at the age of 15, likes to go around on his horse and beat up members of the peasant class because he can. Olga, you went to a pretty fancy school, I think, at some point. Did you have any privileged brats who were beating up peasants? I'm hoping not. Not that I know of, but I do think it's probably thanks to violent computer games, right? So age 16, Ivan does get crowned and his dad has been Prince of Muscovy, but he gets crowned as the

Tsar of all Russia, the Tsar of the Rus. But of course, as a new king, as a new Tsar, he needs to have babies. He's got to have an heir, which means he needs a new wife. So he marries a Tsarina and her name is Anastasia Romanovna and they have a pretty special wedding night. I can only assume he was terrible in bed. On his wedding night, Olga, do you want to guess what the rituals were that were performed in the room to ensure they had a happy marriage and they would have children? What would you do? What would I do on the first night with Ivan the Terrible? Ask him about his dead parents. Clearly no one else has.

This guy has a lot of psychological trauma. They're like, he's a really bad czar. What are you talking about? He lost his parents. What do you think the rituals were? I genuinely don't know. I assume they made love, but the fact that you are asking this question makes me think that maybe they didn't. Well, they probably did.

But as well as that, tubs of wheat and sheaves of rye were spread all over the bed to ensure fertility. Very nice. You've got arrows being shot into the corners of the room to symbolically kill off all the enemies who might be lurking in the shadows. You've got Anastasia's brother, Nikita. He slept next to them in a slightly separate bed, hopefully. And then the icing on the wedding cake was a member of the influential family was outside

the window riding up and down on a stallion waving his sword around. That's nice, isn't it? So basically, it's a full-on spectacular. It's difficult to do it spontaneously if you have such a long rider of things that need to happen in order to create a mood. So the wedding night was red hot. It sounds steamy and dreamy. Unfortunately, Moscow was also red hot that month because there were devastating fires. Thousands are killed, buildings are destroyed, and rumours circulate that the fire has been started deliberately. The rumours say the fire has been started by ghouls.

Excuse me? I didn't know that was an option. Yeah, it's ghouls. Peter, what have ghouls got to do with it? I mean, the Russian word is serdechniki, I think. Serdechniki. Okay, so Moscow, like most towns at this time, is made of wood. And that means that it catches fire regularly.

And summers in Moscow can be really warm. In 1547, the fire is a really bad one. So lots of houses and shops go up. One of the powder towers in the Kremlin blows up and scatters bricks everywhere and kills people. So the first question is, why has this happened? And lots of people start saying, well, it's omens. Others say we're being punished by God. Supposed artists are sort of forced to confess and then beheaded or impaled. But then a story goes around saying it's sirdecniki, so ghouls or sort of ghosts. And these are supposed to be spirits that tear people's hearts out and then

create a special water that creates fire. And at no point does anybody suspect the town that's made out of wood, paper and rayon. Ivan's reign has started pretty badly. So he does the obvious thing, which is declare war because everyone loves a nice war. So he pops on his combat boots and goes and pose for butch selfies with a big manly cannon. And who's he at war with, Peter? So it's heading south towards the Khanates, those post-Mongol entities. And some of them are still pretty powerful, like in Crimea, the Golden Horde. But Ivan, although he's powerful back home, he's taunted. So the Crimean Khan writes to him and says, what do you want, little boy, my affection or bloodshed?

You choose very carefully and we'll see what comes of it. That's so hot! It's quite a good line. But Ivan gets all of his armies together and heads for Kazan because he recognises that if he doesn't capture it, the Crimean Khan will and his enemy will become even more powerful. He appears to spend most of his time inside his tent praying for success, which then duly happens and he forcibly converts the population of Kazan and then heads south

towards Astrakhan, which is on the Caspian Sea, that opens up more trade routes and gathers lots of booty, gets lots of prestige. And so back home in Moscow, everybody's thrilled that this young guy who used to throw dogs and cats off balconies turns out that he's pretty good at delivering, expanding territory, and obviously God is smiling on him. And in terms of his fiscal policy, he's anti-corruption. He closes tax loopholes. He gets rid of the banditry. Things are going quite well. Rulership is a tricky thing to get right.

But generally, transparency, lack of corruption, rooting out all the dodgy officials is quite a smart way of doing it and having law codes that standardise. The question is who stands to benefit? When you centralise, you can concentrate more and more power on the position of the emperor. And that creates its own problems too, because then you have a boyar class who has less authority, less prestige, fewer resources, and it's normally a matter of time before that pressure starts to build up. I'm reminded, Olga, of your show Fight on BBC Sounds. Your father was partially responsible for the economic redistribution of money and power

to just a tiny set of oligarchs. So I guess things happen in cycles in Russian history, perhaps. Oh, yeah. We only know one way to do things, and the way is bad. The major thing that's kind of a huge part of his life isn't 1553 ivan has a terrifying illness that very nearly kills him and his heir is a tiny baby called dimitri and ivan is he's on his deathbed and he's like i want all the boyars to swear allegiance to my baby and they are all like yeah not really that fast, to be honest. And so this is a tricky moment,

isn't it? Because Ivan survives his illness and he's seen all the boyars refuse to pledge allegiance to his son. So is this where he becomes increasingly controlling? The general consensus is that it spooks him. I mean, he really is very close to death. He has his will checked. He's properly ill. And so the fear of leaving a precarious child, it all reminds him of where he's been before. But then when he gets better, he does seem to go after the people

who he thinks haven't shown him the suitable level of respect. Things get very sad for Ivan now at this point, because even though he survives his health crisis his wife Anastasia she doesn't she dies he thinks possibly poison has been involved and also their son Dimitri the baby he tragically gets dropped in a river accidentally and drowns which is obviously very sad and then they've also had three daughters all of whom have died very young so in the space of a few years he's lost his wife and four kids and possibly thinks poison might have been involved.

But he does then settle down and he does find a new love. He finds a new lady and he marries her. And then he finds a new lady and he marries her. And then he finds a new lady and he marries... Actually, Olga, how many wives did ivan the terrible have i genuinely didn't know this aspect but now that like i know for a fact that like there are were always a lot of parallels with henry the eighth six we think seven okay but as with boris johnson's children it's a vague approximation you always have to sort of plus or minus either way we think seven but apparently towards the end of his life he was shopping in england for wife number eight peter actually that's interesting.

So Ivan the Terrible, Tsar of Russia. Russia is quite a long way away from England. But his chief diplomatic ally is Elizabeth I in England. What's that about? Well, it's partly he struggles to find friends locally. That may be a personality thing. But also, all of his neighbours are his rivals. So if you've met him, you don't like him if you're 4,000 miles away. Then he's he's you know his all of his neighbours are his rivals so if you've met him

you don't like him if you're 4 000 miles away and he's safe uh but he's he's very persistent about thinking that england offer opportunities partly because the english themselves are quite interested in exploring trade links to asia and to through russia we get the sense now that ivan is getting increasingly paranoid the boy asked for refused to swear allegiance to his tiny baby. His wife, he thinks maybe was poisoned. So is this when he turns on his boyars now? He now goes in to crush them? Well, he's never had a great relationship with them.

And the problem is that the longer the list becomes of people who have annoyed him or been disgraced or had lands confiscated, the more that paranoia is probably justified. And Ivan potentially lays a very smart trap here, Peter. Historians debate it slightly as to whether he does this on purpose. But he manages to wrestle power away from the boyars by abdicating or pretending to quit. He's like, you know what, I'm done with this, I'm bored of this. And they beg him to come back.

It's slightly hard to make sense of exactly what is going on. Ivan starts announcing that he's got big plans and starts going around Moscow, collecting all the best icons from churches and cathedrals and so on, and holds a service and says goodbye to everybody. And he says, look, I'm basically going to go into some form of exile. I'm not going to abdicate. He doesn't quite say that, but he says, I'm going to create a new kingdom and God is going to tell me where that new place should be. But at the same time as doing that, he writes an open letter essentially to the people of Moscow and he says, this is all the fault of the boyars. I did the best I could, but they're all hopeless and rapacious and they're the cause of all of your problems. And the people of Moscow don't need any excuse or explanation about that. I mean, it's one thing having a czar who sits at

the top, who maybe funnels all the cash into his pockets, but actually the kind of middle management of the boyar class are the ones that nobody likes. The metropolitan liberal elite. Yeah, exactly. The metropolitan, that's exactly what they are. And so they basically say, look, come back, Ivan, we're so sorry. We'll do everything you tell us. And you can choose anything from now on, we won't stand in your way. That's potentially the source of why Ivan gets to be so terrible in the last part of his reign. Yeah, because the next part of his career is what we are getting towards, which is the dark, nasty, horrific, terrible territory. And the thing that he is most famous for is called the oprichnina

olga have you heard of this have you encountered this at school or just in general life yeah that's his like calling card that's his thing that he did that he's remembered for he basically endeavors to destroy the boyar class and then creates like his own personal militia and becomes like a tyrant with his own militia. Well remembered. Oh, sorry. I was talking about Vladimir Putin. Sorry. What?

So, I mean, Peter, Oprichnina is a process of sort of splitting the kingdom almost in half, isn't it? He's sort of taking half the land and going, I will administer these lands with my rules, my men. And then there's a second section of land that the boyars can rule that bit. So it's a sort of divide and conquer section. So what the Oprichnina does is establishes that the crown controls the best cuts of land and forces everybody else off. And so there's a division between the Oprichnina on the one hand,

and then the Zemstvina on the other. And the boyars get to, in theory, be in charge of their own lands, etc. in the Zemstvina, although they all have to keep paying taxes. But on the other hand, the Tsar essentially establishes the Tsar as being all-powerful. He establishes an organization or a bunch of individuals called the Oprichniki, who are black-robed, semi-monastic enforcers who like the spanish inquisition turn up unannounced and demanding to have access to whatever they want olga in terms of the aesthetic i mean peter's mentioned the black robes can you guess what else the operationiki wear oh god now i'm just thinking about that mitchell webb maybe we're the baddies sketch maybe give them all like sickles the way

death does oh nice that would be fun Black robes and a sickle. You're not far off. They had brooms for sweeping away injustice. No! What? They had brooms. They're basically janitors for justice. They would sweep away the treachery as well.

Like bewitched. So the Oprishniki wear black and as well as their brooms and their dark robes, they also had dog-headed logos. The dog symbolising they were going to bite the Tsar's enemies. This is where he becomes Ivan the Terrible, right Peter? In 1568, his rival is a guy called Chelyadin Fedorov, one of the boyars, who he thinks is behind a petition to try and reverse some of these policies. who he thinks is behind a petition to try and reverse some of these policies. Chelyadin Fyodorov is one of these guys who Ivan becomes convinced is after his throne. So he gets him to come to the palace and dresses him up in royal robes and then makes him sit on the throne.

And then he says to him with a kind of classic Goodfellas follow-up, he goes, just as it's in my power to put you on the throne, it's also my power to remove you. And then he stabs him in the chest before getting the oprychniki to polish him off and then chuck him on a dung heap how real housewives is that and we've had i think so far ivan the mean and shifty ivan the pretty sinister ivan the quite shrewd but we are now entering into this phase of his career which i'm afraid to say is genuinely horrific. So he ordered a monk to be sat on a barrel of gunpowder and then had him blown up. And he quoted at the time that if the monk wants to be an angel, he can fly up to heaven.

Why did he have zingers for each and every one of the murders? I don't understand. This is the thing, Olga, is that Ivan the Terrible seems to have a kind of weird sense of humour. There's a sort of irony to some of his executions, as if they're kind of bespokely crafted for the individual victims. A bit like the horrible killer in the Saw movies, like there's a sort of theatre to them. OK, so the next one. He has an archbishop stripped naked, sewn into a bear skin and then set upon by wild dogs. He had seven monks mauled to death by bears. Allegedly, Prince Nikita Odoievsky was executed by having a wound inserted into his chest and then one in his back, and then a shirt was stuffed through the hole in his chest

and out of his back, and then he was flossed to death with his shirt, which is just horrific. They're so gruesome, Peter. They're so horrifying. Do we have reliable sources for this stuff? Do we think these are true? I think it's something he's genuinely doing. The thing that is most telling are letters that Ivan himself writes to other leaders. So he writes the King of Poland and says, look, I hear you being bad-mouthing me, saying I'm cruel and doing nasty things to my subjects. But of course, that's absolute nonsense. I would never punish anybody. I would never fly into merciless rage unless someone had done something really bad and deserved it. And we then get to the story of Novgorod, the city in northwest Russia,

which is his own city. And this is genuinely horrific. And this is probably the worst of his crimes right peter this is the thing that makes him legendary almost it's a bloodbath it's shocking even by his standards so novgorod is one of the older cities in what's now russia and about a hundred years before ivan's reign it becomes incorporated into muscovy and so it's been viewed with a little bit of suspicion by muscovites and by ivan because are rumours that the Novgorodians are upset with Ivan, that they're thinking about throwing their lot in with Poland. So Ivan decides that he wants to teach him a lesson. So he starts to march on the city.

And on the way there, Burns Noble's alive. Anybody who stands up to him gets in his way. Anybody who he thinks looks a little bit funnily at him, they get set on fire and thrown into frozen lakes and held down by stakes to be held under the water. Women are asphyxiated, children made to drink poison. I mean, it's absolutely horrific. And then eventually they reach Novgorod and of course, the Novgorodians think, well, there's obviously a deal to make, there's something we need to sign or, you know, what should we say or do and he'll go away. Instead, it's a sort of bloodbath. Thousands of people killed,

people are hunted down, lots of stories about cannibalism. The sack of Novgorod is a sign that Ivan is seriously unbalanced or is making strategic decisions that create bloodshed on a massive scale. Okay, but we are a comedy show, so here's some light relief, Olga. He doesn't kill everyone. Hoorayay he merely humiliated an archbishop he stripped him of his holy vestments dressed him as a clown married him to a horse strapped him to the horse and made him play musical instruments while riding through the streets of Moscow that's classic that's the classic clown horse musical instrument gag we love it so after seven years of the oprechnina and the reign of terror, the lands being split apart, the persecution of the boyars, this policy comes to an end in 1572.

And it's not because Ivan has had a change of heart and he's now a lovely fella. It's because the Crimean carnates invade and Russia has suffered enormously. So has Ivan's family, because he turns on his daughter-in-law. And of course, famously, he kills his son. You mentioned, Olga, at the beginning of the show, that painting of him killing his son. Do you remember why he kills his son? I don't know the story exactly.

It's like one of the most, this is a terrible word to use, but like effective paintings you'll ever see, because it's directly after he stabbed his son and then you see the glistening tears in his eyes and sort of the understanding what he's just done. The story goes, I think, Peter, his son's wife, his daughter-in-law is pregnant and she is wearing not enough clothes. She's showing too much skin and he attacks her for immodesty. His son steps in to protect her and he smacks him around the head with an iron bar. Is that about right? Yeah, that's one of the stories. There are other stories that are also told about why he kills him. And one is that his son asks the Tsar if he could

have a military command position. And that makes the Tsar think, all right, well, you're trying to take my position too. So wallops him. But I think the consensus is that he sees his son as a threat. So those tears that are painted in are probably well chosen. But clearly, he's a man who's highly disturbed, extremely paranoid and personally very aggressive. By the end of his life, he's a very poorly old man. He's very unwell. He's drinking mercury and arsenic, possibly to cure his ailments. We know this because later on, his body was dug up in Stalin's reign.

Mortality is knocking on Ivan's door. And do we get a sense, Peter, that he's starting to ask for forgiveness and perhaps feeling some grief and remorse for the things that he's done? Yes. So towards the end of his life, he starts creating what are called synodiki. So from the Byzantine world, the Greek world, lists of commemorating people. So he starts writing down everybody he's ordered to be killed, people he's been mean to. It's a long list. It's a very long list.

And none of these survive in full, but there are fragments of enough to tell us that there is a kind of seemingly some sort of act of contrition. So there seems to be some form of reflection going on at the end of this very bloody life. And Olga, do you know how he dies? I don't know, but I really hope he had a good zinger for it. I wouldn't say it was a zinger.

He had a nice bath and then he played a game of chess and then he conked over dead. Did he win the chess game? Oh, I don't know. Mid-game, probably. When he knew he wasn't going to win, he's like, I'm going to peace. Quit a while at my head. The nuance window! Now, this is my favourite part of the show.

This is where Olga and I take a breather and Peter talks for two uninterrupted minutes on something he needs us to know about Ivan. So without much further ado, Peter, take it away. The easiest thing is to blame Ivan as being paranoid or whatever. But, you know, I think we've got to be careful about all of that. First, it's very hard to diagnose from a distance. As it happens, around this period across large parts of Europe, rulers are argued about whether they are unstable in some shape or form, whether they're

pathological sadists. That's the same in Tudor England and Stuart England. That's the same in the French kingdoms. And with Habsburg monarchs. The idea of the ruler as being crazy and bloodthirsty is something that we see in lots of other places. And I suppose the more useful question is about cruelty and political control, right? And in that sense, Ivan, however awful it is, one doesn't have to do a compare and contrast, but seeing the Atlantic slave trade, which is just starting around this time where there's a total disregard for human life and how people are treated, we find it inconceivable to see that people can act with such cruelty towards each other. And yet, this is a kind of world where violence is ubiquitous. And when violence and cruelty are committed, it's not about insanity, or lack of control of faculties. It's about decision making about political control. So, you know, again, there's a lot written about Ivan and that childhood we talked about and how traumatic it was, and did he throw animals off buildings. But you know, his childhood, presumably wasn't any more traumatic than Queen Elizabeth I, whose, you know, mother's executed,

and there's instability and so on. But you know, this is happening at a time where the Reformation is happening over the rest of Europe, where if your religious beliefs are said to be one thing or another, you're tied up to a stake and burnt in city centres. So I think that there is no way, I think, of understanding this other than people believe that the ends justifies the means. In Ivan's case, that wanton cruelty and the scale of it, and as you said, the kind of amusement, is a tool of control in itself. So I think that we've got to be careful to not make Russia exceptional. This is what people do to each other in lots of different circumstances. And so maybe we shouldn't

think of Ivan as being more terrible than anybody else. Maybe all these rulers were terrible too. He just has the misfortune of having his name attached as Grozny. Thank you so much, Peter. Olga? One thing I really did want to talk about is Grozny, which is terrible, like Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Grozny in Russian. The word in Russian is less so terrible and more like authoritarian and scary from a position of power. So it's Ivan the Intimidating? Yeah, more like even that, like intimidating in a serious way, like in a scary way. And I think actually the name Grozny doesn't get applied to him until quite long after he's

dead. So it's not necessarily a thing that everyone was saying at the time. I'd like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we've had the marvellous Professor Peter Frankopan from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Peter. Thank you so much. And in Comedy Corner, we've had the outstanding Olga Koch. Thank you, Olga. Thank you so much. And in Comedy Corner, we've had the outstanding Olga Koch. Thank you, Olga. Thank you so much. And to you, lovely listener, make sure to join me next time as we dive headfirst into the past once more with two different study buddies.

But now I'm off to rebrand myself as the Tsar of podcasting. But a nice one, I promise. Bye! Hello, I'm Melvin Bragg, and I'm back with a new series of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. We're celebrating our 1,000th episode, so there's an extraordinary range of topics for you to get stuck into, from history, science and philosophy, to religion and the arts. This series, we're discussing Albert Einstein, E. Mark Bergman, Plankton, the Versailles Treaty, and much more.

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