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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
Anita Anand
Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer hello and welcome to EMP with me, Anita.
- [01:01]
William Dalrymple
Anand and me William Durample.
- [01:04]
Anita Anand
We are starting a brand new series today. So welcome. And if this is your first time dipping into Empire, welcome, welcome. And if you are one of the people who follows us all the way through, I hope you really enjoyed the Opium series that we did. But what we normally do on Empire is we talk about the rise and fall of empires. It does what it says on the tin.
- [01:21]
William Dalrymple
We talk about history. But Empire has suddenly become current affairs. This is the problem.
- [01:27]
Anita Anand
It really has. I mean, anytime you turn on the news, you'll hear about trade, wars, hot wars, expansion of territory, spheres of influence, and the end of an old world order. And what you've got is a situation where you've got powerful men. They are men hovering around maps with Sharpie pens, and they're drawing circles around territory that they would like to expand into, either physically or with spheres of influence. So what we thought was a good idea, because, you know, we look at history, that's what we're obsessed with, is we were going to look at the last time you had this kind of situation where you had men around a map with pens arguing about who should have what. And that time was when, William and it's really timely that we're doing it now because we in this country just had the 80th anniversary of VE Day, where we're recording quite soon after that. So. So the last time, William, was when?
- [02:21]
William Dalrymple
Well, just before VE Day came the Great Conference of Yalta in 1945. And this was Anita's brilliant idea that we would look at the creation of the world order, which in a sense is being dismantled now because as we all know, Donald Trump started talking about conquering places all over again. So either we'd do a series where we'd look at all the places that Donald Trump wants to add to his property portfolio. Greenland, Panama, Gaza and Canada. And where suddenly empire is on everyone's lips, not as something that happened in history and we now live in a brave new world, but something that is a cadaver which is pushing out of its coffin and whose bony fingers are gripping the. I don't know where that came from. It's a nice image.
- [03:12]
Anita Anand
It is a nice image, yeah. This cadaverous history that just won't go away. So, I mean, as William, there's been talk of Greenland and Canada and Panama, and you've had also sort of Canada pushing back, saying, never, never, never are you having Canada. We are not for sale. And to which Donald Trump said, never say never. So you can see that expanding sphere of influence there.
- [03:36]
William Dalrymple
So Trump, of course, is very serious and has come out in the last hundred days with a real and concerted move on Greenland, backed up, of course, by Vance's visit with Usha. American base couldn't find a single Greenlander who actually wanted to host them and welcome them into their home. So they remained on the American base, as with Canada. They just don't want it. But this is not, apparently, stopping the Donald from wanting to impose. And then most dramatically of all, that monstrous video of Gaza transformed into a Trump Tower with gold statues of Trump. That was created as satire. Then, apparently the story was Mel Gibson had it somehow on his social media feed and he sent it to the Donald, and the Donald put it out, thinking that this was meant to be a laudatory nod to his so called dream of turning the Gaza Strip into a Riviera. And almost as an afterthought, ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from there. So this is all very, very contemporary stuff and I think it's a brilliant idea, Swanita, to put it all together into one series and look at these different fronts in a new imperial war.
- [04:50]
Anita Anand
We're going to do that a bit later on, but what we're going to do right now is look at the past and what it informs us of, maybe the present. So Russia as well, famously on the move. You've got Ukraine and the activities of what's going on between Russia and Ukraine night after night dominating the news agenda, despite the slowdown in advances and talks of truces which last for a day or last for two days and then are broken. Ukraine very much in the forefront of minds right now. But it is, you know, again, just think about this. You just celebrated VE Day, the end of war in Europe, and there is A war going on in Europe. So that is an extraordinary thing. First of all, just put a pin in that in your mind. And also, let me just say that Ukraine now is in the spotlight. Ukraine back then during the Yalta conference was in the spotlight. There is a curious and as you might say, cadaverous symmetry to this. Just to use your analogy again, we've been here before when it comes to this place and in Russia as well, you know, there is a public movement, a popular movement that talks about Novorossiya, Novorossiya, the new Russia.
- [06:03]
William Dalrymple
Very nice accent, Anita. This is your A level Russian spasyma.
- [06:07]
Anita Anand
That's very kind of you. And Putin as well has talked about shoring up. He doesn't talk about it in terms of territory necessarily, but spheres of safety and influence and buffer zones and pushing out against Western influences. And you know what, this whole thing with Ukraine, even though it feels it started, can you believe, February 2022, but this expansionism is going on even before that. So you've got Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia. Then you had 2014, the annexation of Crimea, which is the place where the Yalta conference takes place.
- [06:42]
William Dalrymple
Well before that you, of course, you had Chechnya, the Chechnya war, which was 1994 to 2009, which was not a war of expansion, but it was very much a sort of imperial war, just of the sort that the Russians did in the 19th century. We had last year on the Pod, that wonderful Tolstoy episode. And at that point, the young Tolstoy was in Chechnya and in the Caucasus fighting Muslim tribes. So again, this cadaver pushing out of the coffin, the lid of the coffin sliding.
- [07:11]
Anita Anand
We're not letting it go, are we?
- [07:12]
William Dalrymple
I like it.
- [07:12]
Anita Anand
We're not letting that go. We like it too much. Okay, well, I mean, just standing still by that graveside, you know, you've got spheres, this whole idea of sort of spheres of influence, you know, and you look at the kind of activity that's going on and you can map it almost entirely on Soviet satellite states of yesteryears. And you can understand why Poland is deeply, deeply alarmed by this because they have seen it before. Poland has gone through this before. And just in April of this year, you had Poland accelerating military preparedness for a possible attack from Russia.
- [07:51]
William Dalrymple
My old drinking partner, Radek Sikorsky is the Defence Minister and is ramping up defence spending to unprecedented levels in post war Europe.
- [07:59]
Anita Anand
So they're spending on defence, but there's also voluntary military training for all adults, males, to, you know, make sure that they are battle ready. So you know what? The irony of celebrating 80 years of peace in a year when the world has looked more precarious than it has for decades should not be lost on anyone.
- [08:18]
William Dalrymple
You know what it reminds me of, Anita, is that, you know all those novels that have been written about that long hot summer of 1913 before the First World War breaks out, and you could name about 10 famous novels always set there. And it's always this perfect summer before these young men march off to into the trenches and the mud. And I have this terrible feeling that this is 1913, that we are revving up for all these horrors.
- [08:42]
Anita Anand
There's just a sickening familiarity about it. Look, the Yalta Conference is what we're going to be looking at in the next few episodes. But at the Yalta Conference, there were three countries, two of which we've already mentioned. America and Russia. The third country that was very important. We're going to dig deep into what all of those countries did and their leaders did, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill in the course of the next few episodes. But Britain is not around that table with a Sharpie at the moment. Britain is absent.
- [09:10]
William Dalrymple
We can't even afford the Sharpie these days.
- [09:13]
Anita Anand
Churchill Wood has found it his worst, his worst nightmare. Kos, you've had your Weetabix today, look at you, you're popping them out. But the third country, right now that is in play because if you think of it as a troika of powers sitting over a map is China. Now China completely absent and kept sort of almost in the dark in 1945, when you know, these powers are deciding what's going to happen sometimes in their own territory, but right now, very much in play. So you've got these sort of spheres of influence again, reaching into Africa, for example, reaching into the Asian subcontinent in Pakistan, investments in places. So their influence is becoming much deeper. But there's also active involvement. I mean, there have been recent satellite images which are showing deployment of amphibious invasion barges near Taiwan. Taiwan again has become a real hot button issue. And if you look at these barges, they look so much like Those World War IId day landing crafts that we know from the movies that have been playing again and again and beyond Taiwan. They're sort of talk of nationalist sentiments among Chinese intellectuals and annexation of territories. Some, I mean, these are bonkers voices are even talking about Australia again being in our sphere of influence and therefore should be more in our control. So all of this is in play at the moment.
- [10:39]
William Dalrymple
And let's not forget this is the week that hostilities have broken out between India and Pakistan. And one of the few cards that Pakistan has in a very much diminished deck now is its alliance with China. And Pakistan television has been running sort of wall to wall images of the Chinese embassy in Islamabad being briefed by Pakistan on what's going on. The threat being potentially that China could intervene in this India, Pakistan dispute over Kashmir, which would obviously throw the board over in a very dramatic way. And so again, this world of spheres of influence and the possibility of imperial adventures which just didn't seem, which just.
- [11:22]
Anita Anand
Haven'T happened for decades. They just haven't, you know, this sort of post world order which was meant to put an end to all war held for decades and decades. I would like us to go back to that point and the people a little bit. We're going to do sort of a little bit of an origin story thing now. Let's talk about Yalta.
- [11:40]
William Dalrymple
And before we talk about Yalta, I have a thank you to you, Anita, for putting me onto a wonderful book which is by an author I never read before and about a subject which I, to be honest, I'm absolutely no expert at all, which is Sergei Plokhis, the great Ukrainian historian's book on the price of peace. Astonishingly well written, Daughters of Yalta. Wonderful book by Catherine Grace Katz about this extraordinary trio of daughters that were brought along by Churchill, Roosevelt and Harrimans, the American ambassador. And then our old friend Jas Milton, who's friend of the show and in the early days of Empire, gave us that incredibly moving account of the burning of Smyrna. But his book Checkmate in Berlin, which you, I think, particularly enjoyed. Didn't you love that?
- [12:23]
Anita Anand
I absolutely loved it. I think we're going to get Giles on as part of this series and it will come after the events of the Yotta conference. But can I also commend to you two other books, Diana Preston's excellent Churchill, Rosefield and Stalin, Eight Days that Changed the World. And it talks about this and, you know, beautiful, very studied, very sourced detail also on some of the origin stories that you're going to hear from us. Particularly enjoyed Robert Service on Stalin and of course, you know, Simon Seabag Montefiore has written about Stalin and there are just a number of. I've just been buried in books, let me tell you. Well, look, just before we go to the break, I just want to talk about, because we're going to talk about Yalta and I just want to tell you a little bit about what Yalta is Now and what it was before, so it has been for decades, a bit of a holiday resort on the southern coast of the Crimean Peninsula. It's situated right on the Black Sea. It was the place that all the wealthy oligarchs, they're just normal people used to go because it was sunny and sandy and gorgeous.
- [13:24]
William Dalrymple
Well, before then it was a famous Tsarist resort.
- [13:27]
Anita Anand
It was. It was the playground of the Tsars.
- [13:29]
William Dalrymple
But now we're talking about it in a completely changed world. In 1945, after the Nazis have been in, bombed it flat, destroyed most of it, and in the process of their withdrawal, taken these former Romanov palaces and these princely palaces, including the family who we talked about in an earlier series assassinating Rasputin, Prince Yusupov. Yusupov had a palace on the Crimea in Yalta. And the Nazis, as part of their retreat, just sort of looted this.
- [14:02]
Anita Anand
And there is all of that. There is the looting, but there is also the extraordinary human cost that was suffered by Crimea during that Nazi occupation. And at the time of Yalta itself, which is February 1945, this place, it's like, you can read it like Braille, because there are burnt out houses, burnt out vehicles, skeletons, human beings which are still charred and left on those black pebble beaches that you talk about and which are witnessed by the Big three who have been called deliberately to Yalta by Stalin. He's making the point and we'll get into the details of which. But just a quick little curtain raiser. He didn't want to go anywhere else. And Churchill and Roosevelt did not want to go to Yalta. They wanted to go to Cyprus and.
- [14:49]
William Dalrymple
They'D already been to Tehran, which was sort of three quarters of the way to Russia for the last conference. And the key background to Yalta, which haunts all the decisions made there, was that the Soviets had the upper hand at the conference because they had already retaken most of Eastern Europe.
- [15:08]
Anita Anand
This is interesting because this is a huge point of controversy about Yalta. There are those who think that Roosevelt played this completely wrong, that Roosevelt was willing to go to Yalta because he thought that he could control all or matify Stalin and he needed Stalin to his point of view. And there are those who've looked back at that time saying Churchill was the only one who saw him for what he was and that Roosevelt deeply underestimated what Stalin was capable of. But just a bit more on the Yalta background, then we'll take a break and then we'll talk about the origin stories of the Big Three. They're always known as the big three. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. But this is a place that had been invaded by Germany, the Nazis, in 1941. Much of Ukraine had been occupied. The Nazis, you know, they viewed Ukrainians as Slavs. And all Slavs were untermenschen or subhuman. First. Ukraine sort of welcomed them in saying, you've liberated us from the Soviets. Oh, thank God, thank God you're here. And very quickly it became apparent that they were as bad, straight worse than anything that they had experienced before. So you had forced labor, you had food shortages, and you had the systematic elimination of the Jews. This Reich Commissariat of Ukraine, the General government of Ukraine, if you like, they industrialized the wiping out of Jews from Ukraine. The attitude to the Jews of Ukraine was unspeakable. So there was a report from something called Einsatzgruppe Si, which is one of these sort of ethnic cleansing units that's sent out. And they have taken part in mass shootings near Kyiv at the time, where 33,771 Jews have been murdered over the space of two days. And this is what he writes in his report, 33,771 Jews at Babiyar. And he says the Jews of Kyiv were ordered to appear with their valuables and clothing. They were systematically executed. Another report from a man called Erich Koch, who sort of sets up the civilian government here in Ukraine. And he's absolutely without doubt one of the monsters out of many, many monsters of the Third Reich, says we are the master race and must remember the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here. This land, says another German, is rich, but filled with filth. The Jews have been taken care of. The peasants bow when they see us. So, you know, this is what then the Soviets come and push the Nazis out. And this is the backdrop. This is the suffering land, where it is a bombed out landscape, something that people would have known from before the war was a place of great beauty and a playground to the rich and the famous has become a cauldron of despair and destruction. And that is where Stalin wants to have this meeting.
- [18:01]
William Dalrymple
Quick musical footnote to this. Babi Yar became the basis for Shostakovich's 13th Symphony. And Shostakovich commemorates this mass murder of 33,000 Jews in two days with one of his most beautiful symphonies. So if you're listening to Empire Pod and want a soundtrack for this tragedy, Babi Yar is one of the greatest symphonies of the post War era.
- [18:25]
Anita Anand
Well, let's take a break here, go listen to some Shostakovich, but come straight back because now we're going to talk about the Big Three, the origin story. The Big Three already makes them sound like some kind of Marvel franchise, but what is their origin story? Join us after the break. Welcome back. H.G. wells had said that 1914 was. And it was his expression. I'd forgotten about that. The war that will end war. And yet here we are in Yalta with the Big Three, after victory's almost certain, trying to carve up the peace. And these are huge, gigantic figures, the Big Three, not the Marvel franchise, the real thing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. But who were they really? Well, let's talk about Stalin. Not his real name. Stalin is a moniker meaning man of steel. That became his name because that became what he was known as in Bolshevik Russia.
- [19:22]
William Dalrymple
I'm ashamed to say I didn't know that. I managed to study a level history of this whole thing without ever around anything that's. Stalin wasn't part of his real name.
- [19:28]
Anita Anand
No, no, it wasn't at all his real name. His real name was Dzugashvili Joseph Visarinovich Dugashvili. It's a really Georgian, heavily Georgian name. And he was born on December 18, 1878, in Gorey in Georgia. And he came from really quite humble beginnings. You know how I love my psychodramas and try to understand why people turn out.
- [19:47]
William Dalrymple
Quite a rough background.
- [19:48]
Anita Anand
Yeah, very, very rough. So he had a father who was a cobbler, Bessarion was his name, and his mother, Ekaterina. And he was their third child to survive past infancy. So, you know, infant mortality was very high at that time. And his father's shoemaking workshop didn't do very well. And the reason it didn't do very well is because he loved making these shoes in the Georgian style and kind of the folk style, but they were out of vogue. Everybody wanted to wear Western shoes and shoes that, you know, they saw in magazines from America or they saw, you know, sort of in British newspapers. They didn't want his shoes. And so his business went on decline and he started drinking.
- [20:26]
William Dalrymple
Robert Servus writes beautifully about this, doesn't he?
- [20:29]
Anita Anand
He really does. So he, poor old Ekaterina, his wife, really takes the brunt of this, you know, sort of, you know, Stalin will later talk about beatings of his mother that he witnesses with his own eyes and that he himself gets all sorts of beatings and she's desperate to get him out of this cauldron of violence and misery by sending him somewhere else. So, you know, for her, Stalin, the man of steel that we know is one of the greatest terrors that humanity has ever known. Putin thinks of him as a hero on a pedestal. But this is a man who's responsible, will be responsible for millions of deaths. Is. Is known by his mother, Ekaterina, as this sickly little child who just needs to be protected. And he is sickly, you know, sort of. He gets smallpox as a small child. He has facial scars. At the age of 12, he gets a really bad injury. He's struck by a horse or kicked by a horse, different accounts of this. And it causes him a lifelong disability as a weakness in his left arm. And he only speaks Georgian at home, which is like to a Russian speaking country yokel. You know, it's. It's one of those sort of uneducated in their minds. I mean, it sounds Somerset accent. My husband's from Somerset. He'll understand. But you know what I mean, it's the one, it's the one that people fall back on like that kind of sort of the what the Wurzels of Russia were the Georgians, if you like. Okay. So, you know, he had, he had a lot of things stacked up against him and his father was a terrifying influence in his life and his mother wanted God to save him.
- [21:58]
William Dalrymple
His father throwing a knife at him at one stage. That's one of the.
- [22:01]
Anita Anand
Oh, that's so. Yes, that's a good. Tell us that story. It's such a good story. Go for it.
- [22:05]
William Dalrymple
So Besarion is beating up his wife, as usual.
- [22:08]
Anita Anand
Ekaterina.
- [22:09]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, Ekaterina and baby Joe. The young Stalin picks up a knife and he throws it at his dad. The knife misses, but Bessarion hurls himself at the boy who just managed to escape and run off and gets hidden by the neighbours until the father sobers up. I mean, what a household to come from.
- [22:29]
Anita Anand
It's a house of nightmares. I mean, there are some historians who say Stalin really like to sort of pour lashings of whipped cream on this story. And it might not have been as bad, but let's take him at his word. This is the first time that Stalin stands up to power, but it is also the first time. I mean, he's being raised. There's no doubt he's being raised in a household where power and terror are the language. And he starts to understand them only too well from the. Absolutely. Earlier stage. So his mum wants him out. She just wants to get her smart, smart son to get out of here. And she dreams of him becoming a priest, like in so many, you know, households.
- [23:07]
William Dalrymple
Most improbable piece of his entire biography. Starling goes off to seminary.
- [23:11]
Anita Anand
Well, he goes to seminary because his mother wants him to go to seminary. And he's a good boy, you know, he sort of. Not only does he go to seminary, he goes on a scholarship to become an Orthodox priest in Tiflis Theological Seminary. And he does really well. But gradually he starts losing interest. And it's because he's not a kind of boy who likes to take orders from anybody. So, you know, even, even mis teachers will. Will find this a little bit difficult. So. And he becomes, at this point he's looking for something else. It's not God doesn't answer him. So he becomes obsessed with a proto revolutionary writer called Chemyshevsky, who writes this novel, what is to be Done? And he becomes really obsessed with quoting it to everybody. And he takes a character and says, well, that's my name now, Koba. And there's this bandit protagonist in one of these other sort of quite sort of Bolshevik books. And he goes, well, I am Kober. That's who I'm gonna be. I'm a new man. I'm not that sickly child.
- [24:08]
William Dalrymple
But he then discovers dust capital, doesn't he? And he does this sort of conversion to Marxism and starts attending secret workers meeting a world away from the seminary of the previous year. And Robert Surface thinks this actually makes him feel some sympathy for other society, this brute of a Father Bessarion. And he starts taking in the victimhood of the oppressed workers, the fact that the Tsar has made millions of families miserable. And he finally walks out of the seminary in April 1899, turns his back on God, the Orthodox Church. It couldn't be a more complicated background of Jesus, could it?
- [24:49]
Anita Anand
So it's not only a complicated history, there is a complicated, complicated mind under this thatch of black hair. Rather good looking boy when he was younger. Not very good looking boy, not that I'd ever noticed.
- [25:01]
William Dalrymple
You never noticed such things, Anita, Your eyes always averted.
- [25:05]
Anita Anand
I think if you looked at the young starlink. Bit of a dish. But anyway, look, he's sort of turning into Cobra, this bandit, this person who, you know, understands terror. But he's also writing poetry. So there's a wonderful sort of traffic translation and apparently it's much, much better in the Georgian. The translation is very clunky, but it's called Morning. The pinkish bud has opened. Turning to A pale blue violet and stirred by a light breeze, the lily of the valley has bent over the grass. Oh flower, oh my Georgia, Let peace reign in my native land and may you friends make renowned our motherhood by study. Now he still sounds like a really nice kid, like, yet Katarina would be proud of him. But he is going through this metamorphosis while writing, you know, some. Some would say quite awful poetry.
- [25:51]
William Dalrymple
It doesn't, it doesn't translate convincingly, I have to say.
- [25:55]
Anita Anand
No, honestly, I've been told in the Georgian, it's beautiful. I've been told Jagashvili's Georgian poetry, very nice. But so he starts finding like minded people, as William said. He starts getting into Das Kapital and politics and starting to feel sorry for his father that why did I grow up in such a shadow shitty house? I grew up because my father was oppressed and he would never have made it. And he never made it because these bloody czars are always keeping the working man down. And so with the Bolsheviks, he starts to try and find. And we hear this story so much from people who've come from quite brutal backgrounds to be someone, to become someone, not to be another statistic and not to be like Bessarion who just drinks himself into cruelty and dies without a trace. He wants to be somebody. So he starts remoulding himself as Kober the highwayman. You know, he starts sort of thinking, I'm going to raise funds for the Bolsheviks. And there's that. You know, both Simon Seabag, Montefioro and Giles Milton talk about this. So. Well, I'm going to tell you about a heist, okay? So it's shortly before 11am on the 13th of June, 1907, and two heavily armed carriages are rattling on along the central square of Tiflis, now known as Tbilisi, state capital of Georgia. And seated on one of these carriages is the State Bank's cashier, okay? And the other carriage is backed with police and soldiers and there are outriders all around them. And, you know, this is a really highly secure but highly obvious, look at me, we must be carrying something valuable. Kind of, you know, all of always a problem with these things. And they had a huge amount of money on these carriages. One million rubles, which equates to seven million pounds. And so it's like a big heft of what the State bank owns. But Stalin, soon to be Cobra as he is, or whoever young Mr. Dugashvili wants to call himself, has planned this amazing robbery. So there are going to be 20 of his heavily armed stooges. And he's very popular. Like, people will follow him into fire. He's become a really popular leader. And they're. They're waiting for the carriages to arrive. They're lookouts. Just imagine it. Films, you know, high buildings around corners, is sitting in cafes.
- [28:00]
William Dalrymple
Has there been a movie?
- [28:01]
Anita Anand
There should be. Not that I know of. But, you know, behind newspapers, drinking coffee and watching this carriage go by. And then there are others who are in taverns and they're all sort of exchanging information. And there are two girls who are also there, who no one will suspect, who are running back and forth saying, they're over here, they're over there. Stalin himself, not quite in the middle of the heist, but calling all of the shots. Now, there is one witness who says it was Stalin who threw the first bomb from a rooftop, a signal for the attack to begin. I mean, that might be just fanciful, but this attack then completely jumps on these carriages. The animals are torn to pieces with these explosions that take place and cause complete chaos. There are grenades raining down on these carriages. Policemen, soldiers, you know, they're all just wiped out. There is blood, blood and flesh all over.
- [28:54]
William Dalrymple
Where do they get hand grenades from? It's not necessarily an easy thing to lay your hands on if you just escape from seminary to suddenly find yourself a bunch of hand grenades.
- [29:02]
Anita Anand
I think the Bolsheviks were pretty good at getting their hands on things that they needed to fight in their minds, the good fight. One of Stalin's men chases after the horse and hurls another grenade under its belly, and that explodes then in a shower of horse and blood. And before anyone can understand what's even happening, happening, you've got another one of his bandits who just boldly strides into the square, hurls the banknotes into his carriage, and they take off. They take off at high speed. This has never been done before, that anyone would dare to attack the state bank in this way.
- [29:35]
William Dalrymple
It's very sort of Rob Redford and sort of Butch Cassidy.
- [29:39]
Anita Anand
Butch Cassidy in the Sundance Kids. Absolutely. Absolutely. But the irony of. Irony of all of this is that they couldn't spend a single ruble of the money. So they've got. There's a greatest heist in Bolshevik history, but they cannot spend any of it because it's got these serial numbers which immediately are circulated by the authorities, and anyone spending it will end up sort of being called in and executed. But it's the making of Stalin. It doesn't matter. I included this 1902 mugshot of Stalin, which That's a gorgeous picture.
- [30:11]
William Dalrymple
Unlike you to send me pictures of beautiful, good looking men, Anita. Very out of character.
- [30:16]
Anita Anand
Well, one of them is a surveillance picture. That's what I find really interesting because people, you know, the authorities know that he is a man of interest. They have him on a mugshot for something else. But they also have surveillance pictures where they're following him around. So, you know, they, they have him very much on their radar, but he's just always slightly ahead. And I just want to give you another. I mean, this may be a shorter episode and maybe we'll have to do Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill in the next, because we have wanged on quite a lot in this one, I think.
- [30:43]
William Dalrymple
Give this space. It's all good stuff.
- [30:45]
Anita Anand
Okay. All right, so stick with Stalin because it is a really interesting story and he's somebody I'm just completely fascinated in. So what kind of man is Stalin? I mean, you've got him sort of going through being a good boy trying to protect his mother. A clever boy who writes crap poetry, or good poetry, depending if it's written in the Georgian. A man who defends against brutes, A man who sympathises with brutes and hates the people who've turned him into brutes. A man who goes towards God, goes away from God, lands up with the Bolsheviks and wants to remodel himself as some kind of Robin Hood. So he's sort of striving to be a hero of some kind. But he was a pretty shit human being to women. So he has a first marriage and his wife dies after a year. And by all accounts, this is a love story and it's not his fault his wife dies after one year. But his second wife, he's absolute asshole to. He's so horrible to her. And it's said that, you know, she commits suicide because this is at a time in 1932, a lot later down the road, where she holds him responsible for the kind of famines that Russia is experiencing. So, and, and is awful. He's also pretty loathsome to his son. So I mean, we could talk about the purges at another time, but in the future, Stalin's son, the child of this second marriage, is going to be taken hostage by the Germans and they are going to offer an exchange to him to get his son back. And he just refuses and basically says, screw him, scream, don't care. And his son goes slightly mad as a result. So, you know, all of this tells you a little bit, and we should talk a bit about the great Purges, because the reason that his. His second wife kills herself, because as he rises through the ranks, you know, he becomes the man of steel. Stalin, the man of steel. You see an absolutely homicidal aspect to this man. So, you know, you've got the purges, which begin in 1924, where, you know, party leaders are murdered, the state gets reorganized, all in a sea of blood, as anybody, anybody who's ever opposed him and his rise to the top gets done away with. And then you've got this purge that goes further. He keeps seeing conspiracies anywhere anti Stalinism, anti Stalin, Communists, Communists who aren't loyal enough. And he starts imprisoning in such enormous numbers suspected party dissenters. And then he turns his rage on civilians and military officers and anyone who happens to have cheesed him off that day. And the numbers of the deaths related to the starlings.
- [33:22]
William Dalrymple
Numbers are extraordinary, aren't they?
- [33:23]
Anita Anand
Go on, you give us the numbers. Because they.
- [33:25]
William Dalrymple
It's 1.5 to 3.5 million, put into the Gulag, deported. Katyn massacre, specifically the Great Purge. The Central Purge is estimated to have caused 700,000 to 1.2 million deaths. And the fact there are these vast ranges of figures as measure of how far these guys are just sort of shoved into pits and. And disposed of. There's no figures. There's no final, accurate estimate of this massive bloodshed.
- [33:53]
Anita Anand
Yeah, bloodshed. On an extraordinary, unprecedented, cruel. I mean, man, woman, child. It did not matter to him. If he thought you were part of the problem, you were gone. And the famines that were created as a result of purges and people going missing and nobody to work the land, and the fear and the terror that gripped Soviet Russia as a result of Stalin rising up through the ranks. I mean, that's why we want to do the origin stories, because you probably know about that legacy. And this is also the man, one of the men that Putin very much looks up to because he was strong, because he did not brook dissent, because he surrounded himself with a very tight cadre of loyal men, among them, Barrier, who's sort of like another architect of.
- [34:38]
William Dalrymple
The purges who's very much present at Yalta. The man in charge of the purges is there. Yeah.
- [34:43]
Anita Anand
Who is a very rapey, disgusting individual. So, you know, that is the origin story of Stalin. Join us in the next episode when we will bring to you the origin story of the other two thirds of the big three, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Spencer Churchill.
- [35:03]
William Dalrymple
This is going to be a fun series. I'm very much looking forward to this.
- [35:05]
Anita Anand
Well, I'm very pleased to hear that. So all of that is in store. And let me tell you, Franklin D. Rosebart, a man who is really quite unknown in this country, unless you're doing, you know, GCSE history maybe, but a really fascinating character, AKA the Sphinx. And he had other nicknames as well, which we will go into. Some of them really very uncomplimentary, particularly the one from Benito Mussolini. But you'll have to wait. And if you can't wait, you do. You know how you get to hear these things in one go? If you're a member of the Empire Pod club. And the way to become a member of the EmpirePod club is EmpirePod UK.com that's EmpirePodUK.com and just join up and then you get these things in one go and you don't have to wait till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me, Anita Anan, and.
- [35:51]
William Dalrymple
Goodbye from me, William Dalrymple.
- [36:01]
Anita Anand
Before you go, can we tell you about something really exciting? Exciting?
- [36:04]
William Dalrymple
Have you ever heard an ad on this podcast and thought, hang on, my brand would be way better here than whatever they are gnashing on about?
- [36:12]
Anita Anand
I mean, it's bold of you, but you might be right. And here's the thing, you can actually make that happen. Make the dream real. Imagine your brand front and center on Empire and other shows across the Goal Hanger network.
- [36:24]
William Dalrymple
If you don't know who Gohanger is, they are the producers of this show. And if you're looking looking to get the brand right into the center of everybody's routines, they are the people you want to talk to.
- [36:34]
Anita Anand
If you're curious, just head over to goal hanger.com that's goalhanger. H-A-N-G-E-R.com.