He was credited with defeating Hitler and industrialising Russia. But he was also a ruthless dictator who was responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
In this episode, we explore the brutal life and legacy of "The Grey Blur".
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is the start of another three-part mini-series on European dictators.
[00:00:29] In part one, today’s episode, it’s Joseph Stalin, the Soviet ruler once described as The Grey Blur.
[00:00:38] Next up, in part two, it's going to be the father of fascism, Benito Mussolini.
[00:00:43] And in part three, well you can probably guess, it will be the leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.
[00:00:51] To state the obvious, in the case of all three men, it would be impossible to give a thorough, blow-by-blow account of their lives and historical impact in the space of one episode.
[00:01:03] So, instead, what we will try to do is give an overview of their lives and place in history, give you a sense of the men they were, some of the events that shaped them, and the dark shadow that they left over their countries and the wider world.
[00:01:20] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about Joseph Stalin.
[00:01:26] On the 16th of July 1941, advancing German troops captured a Soviet tank division during the Battle of Smolensk, about 400 kilometres west of Moscow.
[00:01:40] A 33-year-old artillery lieutenant, Yakov Dzughashvili, was taken prisoner.
[00:01:47] He had first removed the officer insignia, or symbols, from his uniform and tried to blend in with the rest of the soldiers. Eventually, however, the man was recognised for who he really was.
[00:02:03] This was no ordinary Soviet soldier: this was the oldest son of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
[00:02:12] What a propaganda coup, what a win, this was for the Germans.
[00:02:18] Not only was their Operation Barbarossa tearing through the Soviet Union, but they had now captured Stalin’s son.
[00:02:27] On the 19th of July, the Germans announced their celebrity capture to the world.
[00:02:33] And they made use of Yakov in their war propaganda, even dropping leaflets with photos of him, shown smiling with Germans, over Moscow.
[00:02:44] A couple of years later, in 1943, when the Germans suffered some significant defeats, Hitler offered Stalin a prisoner swap: in exchange for a famous German field marshal who had been captured at the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin could save his son.
[00:03:04] So, what did the Soviet leader do?
[00:03:07] Well, most parents, I think it’s fair to say, would do absolutely anything to get their child back.
[00:03:15] But Stalin was no ordinary parent, no ordinary man.
[00:03:20] He refused the swap - and any chance of saving his son - telling the Germans: "You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons. Either you free them all or my son will share their fate."
[00:03:39] According to Yakov’s cellmate, it was the news that his father rejected the swap that triggered his attempt to escape from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, an attempt that would prove to be suicidal.
[00:03:53] On the evening of April 14th, 1943, Yakov made a run for the camp fence, calling out to the SS guards: "Don't be a coward. Shoot, shoot."
[00:04:06] When Yakov reached the outer fence, he was shot dead.
[00:04:11] This story is just one of many that underlines Stalin’s ruthlessness and inhumanity, an inhumanity that he would excuse and explain as being only in the interests of his country, of Mother Russia.
[00:04:25] So, where did it all start?
[00:04:28] Well, as Stalin’s name carries such historical weight, it might surprise you to find out that it wasn’t actually his real name.
[00:04:38] Joseph Stalin was actually born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on the 18th of December 1878 in Georgia, which was then part of the Russian empire.
[00:04:50] I’ll call him Stalin from now on, not just because it’s easier for me to say than Dzhugashvili, but because it’s how most of the world knows him.
[00:04:59] And by the way, don’t worry, we’ll find out where he got that name from shortly.
[00:05:04] Now, the young Stalin grew up in poverty.
[00:05:08] His mother was a washerwoman, and his father a cobbler, someone who repairs shoes, and a violent alcoholic who beat him.
[00:05:17] When he was seven years old, Stalin caught smallpox and was left with acne scarring and a deformed left arm.
[00:05:25] He was bullied at school, and in 1894 Stalin’s mother sent him to Tiflis, modern Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to train as a priest.
[00:05:37] During his time there, however, Stalin began reading not the religious scriptures that he was supposed to be studying, but the writings of the grandfather of communism, Karl Marx.
[00:05:49] He joined a local socialist group, and spent most of his time getting involved in revolutionary, anti-monarchy politics.
[00:05:57] He turned his back on religion, becoming an atheist, and by 1899 he had been thrown out of the seminary because he didn’t show up for his exams.
[00:06:09] And in December of 1899, when he was 21, Stalin took his first and only non-political job, working as a clerk in the Tiflis Observatory.
[00:06:21] The job wasn’t particularly demanding, which allowed him to be active in revolutionary politics, organising strikes and protests, and becoming well-known to the Tsarist secret police.
[00:06:34] And he was no stranger to being caught, arrested, by the authorities. Between April 1902 and March 1913, Stalin was arrested seven times.
[00:06:47] He would join the Bolshevik party in 1903, and first met Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, at a party conference held in Finland in 1905.
[00:06:58] Lenin was immediately impressed by the young Stalin, who he saw to be a 'ruthless underground operator.’
[00:07:07] And it turned out that Lenin was right.
[00:07:11] Ruthless, meaning “showing no pity or compassion for others”, is certainly a word we can use to describe Joseph Stalin.
[00:07:20] During this period, he developed a reputation as a dependable, hardworking man skilled in the ‘day to day’ work of revolutionary politics.
[00:07:30] He was never a great public speaker, nor a man of great ideas like the Russian Revolution's two intellectual leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin was willing to risk arrest every single day by organising workers, printing and circulating illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause.
[00:07:52] While Lenin and other more ideological revolutionaries lived abroad and wrote books about class and Soviet society, Stalin was on the ground at the forefront of the difficult, dangerous, and less glorious work that built the basis of revolution.
[00:08:10] For example, in 1907, he robbed a bank in Tiflis, stealing 250,000 rubles [which is around three and a half million Euros in today’s money].
[00:08:22] But the money wasn’t for him, it was to help fund the fledgling socialist cause.
[00:08:28] After the bank robbery, Stalin escaped to Baku, in Azerbaijan, and it was around this time that he adopted the name he would be known as for the rest of his life: Stalin - the Russian for “man of steel”.
[00:08:43] Some say he chose it for its meaning, and others because he also wanted a memorable pseudonym like Lenin, whose real name, just in case you weren’t aware, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, not Vladimir Lenin.
[00:08:59] Interestingly, Stalin had previously gone by another pseudonym in the past: Koba, believed to be named after a Robin Hood type character in a 19th century Georgian novel.
[00:09:12] With his bank robbing history, this certainly seems fitting, appropriate, but it was to be Stalin that stuck.
[00:09:21] After developing his reputation as a ruthless operator, in 1912 he got his first big political job when Lenin asked him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.
[00:09:34] The next few years saw him continue his rise in the Bolshevik party, but the one episode I want to highlight is a brief period in 1913 when he lived in Vienna.
[00:09:47] Amazingly, during his time there he lived in the same part of the city, at the same time, as Hitler, Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud.
[00:09:57] It’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility to imagine that all these four men might have even been in the same cafe at the same time, completely unknown to each other.
[00:10:10] Shortly after returning from Vienna, he was arrested and sent to Siberia, where he was exiled for four years.
[00:10:18] When he eventually got out, in 1917, he returned to St Petersburg and found a revolutionary energy rippling across the country.
[00:10:28] The events of the next few years not only altered Russian history forever, but the political fortunes of Stalin himself, as he went from a respected and committed political operator on the ground to the inner circle of Bolshevik power.
[00:10:46] When the Russian Revolution began in November 1917, Stalin was active as both a political and military leader. He fought in the Russian Civil War, and took up important ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government.
[00:11:02] His reputation continued to grow after he helped Lenin to escape from the Tsar’s army into Finland, and as a reward he was brought into the inner circle of Bolshevik party power.
[00:11:15] Yet, despite his important role in the revolution, Stalin hadn’t established himself as a charismatic speaker, or someone with leadership potential.
[00:11:26] In his memoirs of the revolution, the historian Nikolai Sukhanov, described Stalin as "a grey blur, emitting a dim light every now and then and not leaving any trace."
[00:11:41] Despite his lack of charisma, his dullness, at the 11th Party Congress in 1922, Lenin nominated Stalin as the party's new General Secretary, and this gave him the chance to appoint his own staff - and those loyal to him - through the party and build up his own power base.
[00:12:01] Stalin loyalists were generally newer Communist Party members, often from working-class or peasant backgrounds like he was, as opposed to the "Old Bolsheviks" who were generally more middle class and university educated.
[00:12:17] Then, in January 1924, Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, died.
[00:12:25] He failed to nominate a successor, and as a result his death set in motion a prolonged period of ruthless political manoeuvring.
[00:12:35] Stalin tried desperately to position himself, but there was another, more charismatic candidate, the leader of the Red Army and Stalin’s long time rival, Leon Trotsky.
[00:12:48] Now, there have been entire books written on why Stalin beat Trotsky to the top job, but suffice it to say that it was a combination of trickery, Trotsky’s over confidence, and Stalin’s ruthlessness.
[00:13:03] By 1926, Stalin’s supporters had voted Trotsky out of the Politburo, then the Communist Party in 1927, and then from the entire country in 1929.
[00:13:17] But Stalin wasn’t content to let his enemies and rivals simply “leave” the country and live out the rest of their lives in peace.
[00:13:26] In 1936, Trotsky was granted political asylum in Mexico but was found guilty of treason in a Soviet court during Stalin’s purge of his political opponents.
[00:13:38] And he certainly wasn’t safe in Mexico.
[00:13:41] On the 20th of August, 1940, he was murdered on Stalin’s orders, with an ice-pick no less, making clear that you could never escape from Joseph Stalin.
[00:13:53] After seeing off, or dealing with, several challenges to his power from factional groups within the party and arresting, exiling or murdering any remaining rivals, by 1929 Stalin had established himself as the supreme leader of the party, dictator of the Soviet Union, and a man with a violent sense of revenge.
[00:14:18] With the political infighting behind him and his power firmly established, Stalin began to focus on domestic policy.
[00:14:27] What would come of the revolution, and Lenin’s legacy?
[00:14:31] What would Stalin do with all that revolutionary energy?
[00:14:35] Well, in the late-1920s, the Soviet Union was still an incredibly poor, agrarian society.
[00:14:43] If the Soviet Union did not grow and modernise, Stalin feared, communism would collapse and the country would be overrun by capitalists.
[00:14:54] He put into place a series of 5-year-plans, huge national initiatives to grow and modernise the economy, with the objective of turning it into a modern industrial powerhouse.
[00:15:08] After a promising start, including huge increases in coal, oil, and steel production, it became clear that these plans were terribly flawed.
[00:15:20] The “central planning” and “collectivisation” of this period caused food shortages and famines, and there was a massive human cost to Stalin’s initiatives.
[00:15:32] In the first five-year-plan alone, it’s estimated that up to 8 million people died.
[00:15:40] Stalin was aware of this, of course, but appears to have concluded that this was the acceptable human cost to pay for the modernisation of the Soviet Union.
[00:15:52] There’s a quote that is often attributed to Josef Stalin, of “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”.
[00:16:01] Now, there is actually no historical evidence that he said this, but his actions certainly suggest that he wouldn’t have disagreed with it.
[00:16:11] And although he was the supreme leader of the country and had already dispatched anyone who dared to oppose him, during the mid-to-late-1930s, Stalin grew increasingly insecure and paranoid in his position.
[00:16:28] He feared that factions of the Communist Party and Army were conspiring, or plotting, against him, and he began a ruthless political purge that made his behaviour in the late-1920s seem tame, or soft.
[00:16:44] From 1936 to 1939, 93 of the Communist Party’s 139 Central Committee members were killed, and 81 of Stalin’s 103 generals and admirals were executed.
[00:17:01] Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, ruled with an iron first and encouraged Soviets to inform on one another, accusing as many as 3 million people of opposing Communism.
[00:17:16] There were extensive show trials, theoretically “free” trials of political opponents, but they were essentially predetermined public trials of anyone who opposed Stalin, which would almost always result in the execution of the guilty party.
[00:17:34] And for those simply sent away, most were sent to the gulag, a collection of labour camps in Siberia, where it’s thought that around 750,000 people were killed.
[00:17:47] Now we should move from Stalin’s domestic policy to his foreign, and perhaps the thing - besides the famines and purges - that he is most remembered for, the Second World War, and the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazism.
[00:18:03] Now, as you’ll know, Hitler and Stalin were initially allies, or at least, not enemies.
[00:18:11] On the 24th of August, 1939, shortly before the Nazis marched into Poland, Hitler and Stalin made a non-aggression agreement, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
[00:18:24] Put simply, this meant that the Soviets and Germans agreed not to attack one another and that they would divide the countries between them, carving up Poland.
[00:18:37] This “non-aggression” would last almost two years, before Hitler decided to go back on the pact, launching the invasion of Russia with Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941.
[00:18:51] And he caught the Soviets by surprise, completely unprepared. Stalin had reportedly been advised as early as 1940 that the Nazis had been planning to invade, but had shrugged off these warnings.
[00:19:07] He was furious at Hitler's betrayal but did nothing, or very little at least, for a few days.
[00:19:15] As Stalin hid away and thought about what to do next, the Soviet Union waited as the Nazi army advanced towards Moscow.
[00:19:26] Now, as you may know, this turning on the Soviet Union was to be a grave error of judgement on Hitler’s part, a decision that changed the course of World War II, and with it, world history.
[00:19:40] Suffice it to say that it was hugely bloody, with the Battle of Stalingrad killing a staggering 19,000 people a day, a total of 1.2 million people
[00:19:53] Eventually, as you will know, it proved to be too much, and the Soviets were able to push the Nazi forces all the way back to Berlin in 1945, resulting in the eventual surrender of the German army.
[00:20:07] OK, that is a whistle stop tour of the Second World War, but we must leave time for the postwar era, the era where Stalin went from ally of the West to public enemy number one.
[00:20:21] It’s important to remember Stalin’s early years, and his dedication to the socialist cause. Yes, he had allied with the Allied forces, including Britain and the United States, but he believed in a vastly different ideological system.
[00:20:39] They were allies in name only, and with their mutual enemy Adolf Hitler out of the picture, there was the question of how to rebuild, and how to divide, the remains of Europe.
[00:20:52] Stalin sensed his opportunity.
[00:20:55] He demanded that the countries surrounding the Soviet Union should become socialist satellite states, swallowing up much of Eastern Europe into the USSR, and putting up what Winston Churchill would call an “iron curtain” between the USSR and the rest of Europe.
[00:21:13] After all of this territorial expansion, Stalin found himself ruling over almost 200 million people living in the USSR.
[00:21:23] He was more popular than ever, after having defeated the Nazis, but he was still deeply nervous and paranoid about his position.
[00:21:32] Literally millions of people were imprisoned or executed, and by one estimate, by 1953 three percent of the entire USSR population was imprisoned.
[00:21:47] 1953 would be an important year for Stalin for another reason, though.
[00:21:53] Stalin had always enjoyed a drink, he had been a heavy drinker, and had reportedly stayed up until 3am in 1942 with Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister.
[00:22:05] But on the 5th of March, 1953, at the age of 74, it seemed he couldn’t keep up.
[00:22:12] He had been drinking heavily, and the following day, when his attendants came into his room, they found him sprawled out on the floor.
[00:22:22] Initially, they thought he was just in a bad way after drinking lots of alcohol, but it turned out that he had had a huge stroke.
[00:22:33] On 6 March 1953, the announcement went out to the people of the Soviet Union.
[00:22:40] Josef Stalin was dead.
[00:22:44] It was, to state the obvious, a monumental event.
[00:22:48] He had held an iron grip on the country for almost 30 years, enacting huge changes on the country.
[00:22:56] And now he was gone.
[00:22:59] In the aftermath of his death, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced him.
[00:23:04] He criticised the cult of personality that Stalin had created, his totalitarianism, the gulags, the executions, imprisonment and torture of political opponents, blaming Stalin for the millions of young Soviets who had died at war, and the millions that had starved because of his disastrous agricultural policies.
[00:23:27] And he pledged to start the "de-stalinization" of the country, a process that some might argue has never really finished. Indeed, Vladimir Putin has, in recent years, gone on a campaign to rehabilitate Stalin, and clearly his invasion of Ukraine at the start of 2022 shows Stalin-like expansionist tendencies.
[00:23:51] Now, when it comes to any assessment of the legacy of Joseph Stalin, on one level, it's a complicated one.
[00:24:00] Especially in the immediate aftermath of his death, to many within the Soviet Union he was remembered as a great leader who modernised the country, taking it from a backward, feudal economy into an industrial and military power capable of defeating Hitler.
[00:24:19] To much of the rest of the world, however, he is remembered as a ruthless dictator, a man who some historians have said bears personal responsibility for the deaths of 20 million people.
[00:24:34] He is a man who, with his favourite little blue pencil, would stay up late into the night and then write “execute them all” on an official document, with one stroke of his pencil committing tens of thousands of people to their deaths.
[00:24:50] No matter what his intentions might have been, it’s clear that he was a man who was prepared to murder, torture and sacrifice millions of Soviets - whether it be people starving to death in famine, or even his own son - to get what he wanted.
[00:25:10] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on Joseph Stalin, one of the twentieth-century’s most ruthless leaders and part one on our mini-series on dictators.
[00:25:20] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Stalin, or this was the first time you’d really got into his story, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:25:30] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:25:34] If you live in the former USSR, how did you learn about Stalin in school?
[00:25:39] How do you think the legacy of Joseph Stalin is still felt today?
[00:25:44] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:25:47] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is the start of another three-part mini-series on European dictators.
[00:00:29] In part one, today’s episode, it’s Joseph Stalin, the Soviet ruler once described as The Grey Blur.
[00:00:38] Next up, in part two, it's going to be the father of fascism, Benito Mussolini.
[00:00:43] And in part three, well you can probably guess, it will be the leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.
[00:00:51] To state the obvious, in the case of all three men, it would be impossible to give a thorough, blow-by-blow account of their lives and historical impact in the space of one episode.
[00:01:03] So, instead, what we will try to do is give an overview of their lives and place in history, give you a sense of the men they were, some of the events that shaped them, and the dark shadow that they left over their countries and the wider world.
[00:01:20] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about Joseph Stalin.
[00:01:26] On the 16th of July 1941, advancing German troops captured a Soviet tank division during the Battle of Smolensk, about 400 kilometres west of Moscow.
[00:01:40] A 33-year-old artillery lieutenant, Yakov Dzughashvili, was taken prisoner.
[00:01:47] He had first removed the officer insignia, or symbols, from his uniform and tried to blend in with the rest of the soldiers. Eventually, however, the man was recognised for who he really was.
[00:02:03] This was no ordinary Soviet soldier: this was the oldest son of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
[00:02:12] What a propaganda coup, what a win, this was for the Germans.
[00:02:18] Not only was their Operation Barbarossa tearing through the Soviet Union, but they had now captured Stalin’s son.
[00:02:27] On the 19th of July, the Germans announced their celebrity capture to the world.
[00:02:33] And they made use of Yakov in their war propaganda, even dropping leaflets with photos of him, shown smiling with Germans, over Moscow.
[00:02:44] A couple of years later, in 1943, when the Germans suffered some significant defeats, Hitler offered Stalin a prisoner swap: in exchange for a famous German field marshal who had been captured at the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin could save his son.
[00:03:04] So, what did the Soviet leader do?
[00:03:07] Well, most parents, I think it’s fair to say, would do absolutely anything to get their child back.
[00:03:15] But Stalin was no ordinary parent, no ordinary man.
[00:03:20] He refused the swap - and any chance of saving his son - telling the Germans: "You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons. Either you free them all or my son will share their fate."
[00:03:39] According to Yakov’s cellmate, it was the news that his father rejected the swap that triggered his attempt to escape from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, an attempt that would prove to be suicidal.
[00:03:53] On the evening of April 14th, 1943, Yakov made a run for the camp fence, calling out to the SS guards: "Don't be a coward. Shoot, shoot."
[00:04:06] When Yakov reached the outer fence, he was shot dead.
[00:04:11] This story is just one of many that underlines Stalin’s ruthlessness and inhumanity, an inhumanity that he would excuse and explain as being only in the interests of his country, of Mother Russia.
[00:04:25] So, where did it all start?
[00:04:28] Well, as Stalin’s name carries such historical weight, it might surprise you to find out that it wasn’t actually his real name.
[00:04:38] Joseph Stalin was actually born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on the 18th of December 1878 in Georgia, which was then part of the Russian empire.
[00:04:50] I’ll call him Stalin from now on, not just because it’s easier for me to say than Dzhugashvili, but because it’s how most of the world knows him.
[00:04:59] And by the way, don’t worry, we’ll find out where he got that name from shortly.
[00:05:04] Now, the young Stalin grew up in poverty.
[00:05:08] His mother was a washerwoman, and his father a cobbler, someone who repairs shoes, and a violent alcoholic who beat him.
[00:05:17] When he was seven years old, Stalin caught smallpox and was left with acne scarring and a deformed left arm.
[00:05:25] He was bullied at school, and in 1894 Stalin’s mother sent him to Tiflis, modern Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to train as a priest.
[00:05:37] During his time there, however, Stalin began reading not the religious scriptures that he was supposed to be studying, but the writings of the grandfather of communism, Karl Marx.
[00:05:49] He joined a local socialist group, and spent most of his time getting involved in revolutionary, anti-monarchy politics.
[00:05:57] He turned his back on religion, becoming an atheist, and by 1899 he had been thrown out of the seminary because he didn’t show up for his exams.
[00:06:09] And in December of 1899, when he was 21, Stalin took his first and only non-political job, working as a clerk in the Tiflis Observatory.
[00:06:21] The job wasn’t particularly demanding, which allowed him to be active in revolutionary politics, organising strikes and protests, and becoming well-known to the Tsarist secret police.
[00:06:34] And he was no stranger to being caught, arrested, by the authorities. Between April 1902 and March 1913, Stalin was arrested seven times.
[00:06:47] He would join the Bolshevik party in 1903, and first met Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, at a party conference held in Finland in 1905.
[00:06:58] Lenin was immediately impressed by the young Stalin, who he saw to be a 'ruthless underground operator.’
[00:07:07] And it turned out that Lenin was right.
[00:07:11] Ruthless, meaning “showing no pity or compassion for others”, is certainly a word we can use to describe Joseph Stalin.
[00:07:20] During this period, he developed a reputation as a dependable, hardworking man skilled in the ‘day to day’ work of revolutionary politics.
[00:07:30] He was never a great public speaker, nor a man of great ideas like the Russian Revolution's two intellectual leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin was willing to risk arrest every single day by organising workers, printing and circulating illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause.
[00:07:52] While Lenin and other more ideological revolutionaries lived abroad and wrote books about class and Soviet society, Stalin was on the ground at the forefront of the difficult, dangerous, and less glorious work that built the basis of revolution.
[00:08:10] For example, in 1907, he robbed a bank in Tiflis, stealing 250,000 rubles [which is around three and a half million Euros in today’s money].
[00:08:22] But the money wasn’t for him, it was to help fund the fledgling socialist cause.
[00:08:28] After the bank robbery, Stalin escaped to Baku, in Azerbaijan, and it was around this time that he adopted the name he would be known as for the rest of his life: Stalin - the Russian for “man of steel”.
[00:08:43] Some say he chose it for its meaning, and others because he also wanted a memorable pseudonym like Lenin, whose real name, just in case you weren’t aware, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, not Vladimir Lenin.
[00:08:59] Interestingly, Stalin had previously gone by another pseudonym in the past: Koba, believed to be named after a Robin Hood type character in a 19th century Georgian novel.
[00:09:12] With his bank robbing history, this certainly seems fitting, appropriate, but it was to be Stalin that stuck.
[00:09:21] After developing his reputation as a ruthless operator, in 1912 he got his first big political job when Lenin asked him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.
[00:09:34] The next few years saw him continue his rise in the Bolshevik party, but the one episode I want to highlight is a brief period in 1913 when he lived in Vienna.
[00:09:47] Amazingly, during his time there he lived in the same part of the city, at the same time, as Hitler, Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud.
[00:09:57] It’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility to imagine that all these four men might have even been in the same cafe at the same time, completely unknown to each other.
[00:10:10] Shortly after returning from Vienna, he was arrested and sent to Siberia, where he was exiled for four years.
[00:10:18] When he eventually got out, in 1917, he returned to St Petersburg and found a revolutionary energy rippling across the country.
[00:10:28] The events of the next few years not only altered Russian history forever, but the political fortunes of Stalin himself, as he went from a respected and committed political operator on the ground to the inner circle of Bolshevik power.
[00:10:46] When the Russian Revolution began in November 1917, Stalin was active as both a political and military leader. He fought in the Russian Civil War, and took up important ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government.
[00:11:02] His reputation continued to grow after he helped Lenin to escape from the Tsar’s army into Finland, and as a reward he was brought into the inner circle of Bolshevik party power.
[00:11:15] Yet, despite his important role in the revolution, Stalin hadn’t established himself as a charismatic speaker, or someone with leadership potential.
[00:11:26] In his memoirs of the revolution, the historian Nikolai Sukhanov, described Stalin as "a grey blur, emitting a dim light every now and then and not leaving any trace."
[00:11:41] Despite his lack of charisma, his dullness, at the 11th Party Congress in 1922, Lenin nominated Stalin as the party's new General Secretary, and this gave him the chance to appoint his own staff - and those loyal to him - through the party and build up his own power base.
[00:12:01] Stalin loyalists were generally newer Communist Party members, often from working-class or peasant backgrounds like he was, as opposed to the "Old Bolsheviks" who were generally more middle class and university educated.
[00:12:17] Then, in January 1924, Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, died.
[00:12:25] He failed to nominate a successor, and as a result his death set in motion a prolonged period of ruthless political manoeuvring.
[00:12:35] Stalin tried desperately to position himself, but there was another, more charismatic candidate, the leader of the Red Army and Stalin’s long time rival, Leon Trotsky.
[00:12:48] Now, there have been entire books written on why Stalin beat Trotsky to the top job, but suffice it to say that it was a combination of trickery, Trotsky’s over confidence, and Stalin’s ruthlessness.
[00:13:03] By 1926, Stalin’s supporters had voted Trotsky out of the Politburo, then the Communist Party in 1927, and then from the entire country in 1929.
[00:13:17] But Stalin wasn’t content to let his enemies and rivals simply “leave” the country and live out the rest of their lives in peace.
[00:13:26] In 1936, Trotsky was granted political asylum in Mexico but was found guilty of treason in a Soviet court during Stalin’s purge of his political opponents.
[00:13:38] And he certainly wasn’t safe in Mexico.
[00:13:41] On the 20th of August, 1940, he was murdered on Stalin’s orders, with an ice-pick no less, making clear that you could never escape from Joseph Stalin.
[00:13:53] After seeing off, or dealing with, several challenges to his power from factional groups within the party and arresting, exiling or murdering any remaining rivals, by 1929 Stalin had established himself as the supreme leader of the party, dictator of the Soviet Union, and a man with a violent sense of revenge.
[00:14:18] With the political infighting behind him and his power firmly established, Stalin began to focus on domestic policy.
[00:14:27] What would come of the revolution, and Lenin’s legacy?
[00:14:31] What would Stalin do with all that revolutionary energy?
[00:14:35] Well, in the late-1920s, the Soviet Union was still an incredibly poor, agrarian society.
[00:14:43] If the Soviet Union did not grow and modernise, Stalin feared, communism would collapse and the country would be overrun by capitalists.
[00:14:54] He put into place a series of 5-year-plans, huge national initiatives to grow and modernise the economy, with the objective of turning it into a modern industrial powerhouse.
[00:15:08] After a promising start, including huge increases in coal, oil, and steel production, it became clear that these plans were terribly flawed.
[00:15:20] The “central planning” and “collectivisation” of this period caused food shortages and famines, and there was a massive human cost to Stalin’s initiatives.
[00:15:32] In the first five-year-plan alone, it’s estimated that up to 8 million people died.
[00:15:40] Stalin was aware of this, of course, but appears to have concluded that this was the acceptable human cost to pay for the modernisation of the Soviet Union.
[00:15:52] There’s a quote that is often attributed to Josef Stalin, of “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”.
[00:16:01] Now, there is actually no historical evidence that he said this, but his actions certainly suggest that he wouldn’t have disagreed with it.
[00:16:11] And although he was the supreme leader of the country and had already dispatched anyone who dared to oppose him, during the mid-to-late-1930s, Stalin grew increasingly insecure and paranoid in his position.
[00:16:28] He feared that factions of the Communist Party and Army were conspiring, or plotting, against him, and he began a ruthless political purge that made his behaviour in the late-1920s seem tame, or soft.
[00:16:44] From 1936 to 1939, 93 of the Communist Party’s 139 Central Committee members were killed, and 81 of Stalin’s 103 generals and admirals were executed.
[00:17:01] Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, ruled with an iron first and encouraged Soviets to inform on one another, accusing as many as 3 million people of opposing Communism.
[00:17:16] There were extensive show trials, theoretically “free” trials of political opponents, but they were essentially predetermined public trials of anyone who opposed Stalin, which would almost always result in the execution of the guilty party.
[00:17:34] And for those simply sent away, most were sent to the gulag, a collection of labour camps in Siberia, where it’s thought that around 750,000 people were killed.
[00:17:47] Now we should move from Stalin’s domestic policy to his foreign, and perhaps the thing - besides the famines and purges - that he is most remembered for, the Second World War, and the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazism.
[00:18:03] Now, as you’ll know, Hitler and Stalin were initially allies, or at least, not enemies.
[00:18:11] On the 24th of August, 1939, shortly before the Nazis marched into Poland, Hitler and Stalin made a non-aggression agreement, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
[00:18:24] Put simply, this meant that the Soviets and Germans agreed not to attack one another and that they would divide the countries between them, carving up Poland.
[00:18:37] This “non-aggression” would last almost two years, before Hitler decided to go back on the pact, launching the invasion of Russia with Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941.
[00:18:51] And he caught the Soviets by surprise, completely unprepared. Stalin had reportedly been advised as early as 1940 that the Nazis had been planning to invade, but had shrugged off these warnings.
[00:19:07] He was furious at Hitler's betrayal but did nothing, or very little at least, for a few days.
[00:19:15] As Stalin hid away and thought about what to do next, the Soviet Union waited as the Nazi army advanced towards Moscow.
[00:19:26] Now, as you may know, this turning on the Soviet Union was to be a grave error of judgement on Hitler’s part, a decision that changed the course of World War II, and with it, world history.
[00:19:40] Suffice it to say that it was hugely bloody, with the Battle of Stalingrad killing a staggering 19,000 people a day, a total of 1.2 million people
[00:19:53] Eventually, as you will know, it proved to be too much, and the Soviets were able to push the Nazi forces all the way back to Berlin in 1945, resulting in the eventual surrender of the German army.
[00:20:07] OK, that is a whistle stop tour of the Second World War, but we must leave time for the postwar era, the era where Stalin went from ally of the West to public enemy number one.
[00:20:21] It’s important to remember Stalin’s early years, and his dedication to the socialist cause. Yes, he had allied with the Allied forces, including Britain and the United States, but he believed in a vastly different ideological system.
[00:20:39] They were allies in name only, and with their mutual enemy Adolf Hitler out of the picture, there was the question of how to rebuild, and how to divide, the remains of Europe.
[00:20:52] Stalin sensed his opportunity.
[00:20:55] He demanded that the countries surrounding the Soviet Union should become socialist satellite states, swallowing up much of Eastern Europe into the USSR, and putting up what Winston Churchill would call an “iron curtain” between the USSR and the rest of Europe.
[00:21:13] After all of this territorial expansion, Stalin found himself ruling over almost 200 million people living in the USSR.
[00:21:23] He was more popular than ever, after having defeated the Nazis, but he was still deeply nervous and paranoid about his position.
[00:21:32] Literally millions of people were imprisoned or executed, and by one estimate, by 1953 three percent of the entire USSR population was imprisoned.
[00:21:47] 1953 would be an important year for Stalin for another reason, though.
[00:21:53] Stalin had always enjoyed a drink, he had been a heavy drinker, and had reportedly stayed up until 3am in 1942 with Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister.
[00:22:05] But on the 5th of March, 1953, at the age of 74, it seemed he couldn’t keep up.
[00:22:12] He had been drinking heavily, and the following day, when his attendants came into his room, they found him sprawled out on the floor.
[00:22:22] Initially, they thought he was just in a bad way after drinking lots of alcohol, but it turned out that he had had a huge stroke.
[00:22:33] On 6 March 1953, the announcement went out to the people of the Soviet Union.
[00:22:40] Josef Stalin was dead.
[00:22:44] It was, to state the obvious, a monumental event.
[00:22:48] He had held an iron grip on the country for almost 30 years, enacting huge changes on the country.
[00:22:56] And now he was gone.
[00:22:59] In the aftermath of his death, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced him.
[00:23:04] He criticised the cult of personality that Stalin had created, his totalitarianism, the gulags, the executions, imprisonment and torture of political opponents, blaming Stalin for the millions of young Soviets who had died at war, and the millions that had starved because of his disastrous agricultural policies.
[00:23:27] And he pledged to start the "de-stalinization" of the country, a process that some might argue has never really finished. Indeed, Vladimir Putin has, in recent years, gone on a campaign to rehabilitate Stalin, and clearly his invasion of Ukraine at the start of 2022 shows Stalin-like expansionist tendencies.
[00:23:51] Now, when it comes to any assessment of the legacy of Joseph Stalin, on one level, it's a complicated one.
[00:24:00] Especially in the immediate aftermath of his death, to many within the Soviet Union he was remembered as a great leader who modernised the country, taking it from a backward, feudal economy into an industrial and military power capable of defeating Hitler.
[00:24:19] To much of the rest of the world, however, he is remembered as a ruthless dictator, a man who some historians have said bears personal responsibility for the deaths of 20 million people.
[00:24:34] He is a man who, with his favourite little blue pencil, would stay up late into the night and then write “execute them all” on an official document, with one stroke of his pencil committing tens of thousands of people to their deaths.
[00:24:50] No matter what his intentions might have been, it’s clear that he was a man who was prepared to murder, torture and sacrifice millions of Soviets - whether it be people starving to death in famine, or even his own son - to get what he wanted.
[00:25:10] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on Joseph Stalin, one of the twentieth-century’s most ruthless leaders and part one on our mini-series on dictators.
[00:25:20] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Stalin, or this was the first time you’d really got into his story, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:25:30] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:25:34] If you live in the former USSR, how did you learn about Stalin in school?
[00:25:39] How do you think the legacy of Joseph Stalin is still felt today?
[00:25:44] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:25:47] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is the start of another three-part mini-series on European dictators.
[00:00:29] In part one, today’s episode, it’s Joseph Stalin, the Soviet ruler once described as The Grey Blur.
[00:00:38] Next up, in part two, it's going to be the father of fascism, Benito Mussolini.
[00:00:43] And in part three, well you can probably guess, it will be the leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.
[00:00:51] To state the obvious, in the case of all three men, it would be impossible to give a thorough, blow-by-blow account of their lives and historical impact in the space of one episode.
[00:01:03] So, instead, what we will try to do is give an overview of their lives and place in history, give you a sense of the men they were, some of the events that shaped them, and the dark shadow that they left over their countries and the wider world.
[00:01:20] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about Joseph Stalin.
[00:01:26] On the 16th of July 1941, advancing German troops captured a Soviet tank division during the Battle of Smolensk, about 400 kilometres west of Moscow.
[00:01:40] A 33-year-old artillery lieutenant, Yakov Dzughashvili, was taken prisoner.
[00:01:47] He had first removed the officer insignia, or symbols, from his uniform and tried to blend in with the rest of the soldiers. Eventually, however, the man was recognised for who he really was.
[00:02:03] This was no ordinary Soviet soldier: this was the oldest son of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
[00:02:12] What a propaganda coup, what a win, this was for the Germans.
[00:02:18] Not only was their Operation Barbarossa tearing through the Soviet Union, but they had now captured Stalin’s son.
[00:02:27] On the 19th of July, the Germans announced their celebrity capture to the world.
[00:02:33] And they made use of Yakov in their war propaganda, even dropping leaflets with photos of him, shown smiling with Germans, over Moscow.
[00:02:44] A couple of years later, in 1943, when the Germans suffered some significant defeats, Hitler offered Stalin a prisoner swap: in exchange for a famous German field marshal who had been captured at the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin could save his son.
[00:03:04] So, what did the Soviet leader do?
[00:03:07] Well, most parents, I think it’s fair to say, would do absolutely anything to get their child back.
[00:03:15] But Stalin was no ordinary parent, no ordinary man.
[00:03:20] He refused the swap - and any chance of saving his son - telling the Germans: "You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons. Either you free them all or my son will share their fate."
[00:03:39] According to Yakov’s cellmate, it was the news that his father rejected the swap that triggered his attempt to escape from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, an attempt that would prove to be suicidal.
[00:03:53] On the evening of April 14th, 1943, Yakov made a run for the camp fence, calling out to the SS guards: "Don't be a coward. Shoot, shoot."
[00:04:06] When Yakov reached the outer fence, he was shot dead.
[00:04:11] This story is just one of many that underlines Stalin’s ruthlessness and inhumanity, an inhumanity that he would excuse and explain as being only in the interests of his country, of Mother Russia.
[00:04:25] So, where did it all start?
[00:04:28] Well, as Stalin’s name carries such historical weight, it might surprise you to find out that it wasn’t actually his real name.
[00:04:38] Joseph Stalin was actually born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on the 18th of December 1878 in Georgia, which was then part of the Russian empire.
[00:04:50] I’ll call him Stalin from now on, not just because it’s easier for me to say than Dzhugashvili, but because it’s how most of the world knows him.
[00:04:59] And by the way, don’t worry, we’ll find out where he got that name from shortly.
[00:05:04] Now, the young Stalin grew up in poverty.
[00:05:08] His mother was a washerwoman, and his father a cobbler, someone who repairs shoes, and a violent alcoholic who beat him.
[00:05:17] When he was seven years old, Stalin caught smallpox and was left with acne scarring and a deformed left arm.
[00:05:25] He was bullied at school, and in 1894 Stalin’s mother sent him to Tiflis, modern Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to train as a priest.
[00:05:37] During his time there, however, Stalin began reading not the religious scriptures that he was supposed to be studying, but the writings of the grandfather of communism, Karl Marx.
[00:05:49] He joined a local socialist group, and spent most of his time getting involved in revolutionary, anti-monarchy politics.
[00:05:57] He turned his back on religion, becoming an atheist, and by 1899 he had been thrown out of the seminary because he didn’t show up for his exams.
[00:06:09] And in December of 1899, when he was 21, Stalin took his first and only non-political job, working as a clerk in the Tiflis Observatory.
[00:06:21] The job wasn’t particularly demanding, which allowed him to be active in revolutionary politics, organising strikes and protests, and becoming well-known to the Tsarist secret police.
[00:06:34] And he was no stranger to being caught, arrested, by the authorities. Between April 1902 and March 1913, Stalin was arrested seven times.
[00:06:47] He would join the Bolshevik party in 1903, and first met Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, at a party conference held in Finland in 1905.
[00:06:58] Lenin was immediately impressed by the young Stalin, who he saw to be a 'ruthless underground operator.’
[00:07:07] And it turned out that Lenin was right.
[00:07:11] Ruthless, meaning “showing no pity or compassion for others”, is certainly a word we can use to describe Joseph Stalin.
[00:07:20] During this period, he developed a reputation as a dependable, hardworking man skilled in the ‘day to day’ work of revolutionary politics.
[00:07:30] He was never a great public speaker, nor a man of great ideas like the Russian Revolution's two intellectual leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, but Stalin was willing to risk arrest every single day by organising workers, printing and circulating illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause.
[00:07:52] While Lenin and other more ideological revolutionaries lived abroad and wrote books about class and Soviet society, Stalin was on the ground at the forefront of the difficult, dangerous, and less glorious work that built the basis of revolution.
[00:08:10] For example, in 1907, he robbed a bank in Tiflis, stealing 250,000 rubles [which is around three and a half million Euros in today’s money].
[00:08:22] But the money wasn’t for him, it was to help fund the fledgling socialist cause.
[00:08:28] After the bank robbery, Stalin escaped to Baku, in Azerbaijan, and it was around this time that he adopted the name he would be known as for the rest of his life: Stalin - the Russian for “man of steel”.
[00:08:43] Some say he chose it for its meaning, and others because he also wanted a memorable pseudonym like Lenin, whose real name, just in case you weren’t aware, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, not Vladimir Lenin.
[00:08:59] Interestingly, Stalin had previously gone by another pseudonym in the past: Koba, believed to be named after a Robin Hood type character in a 19th century Georgian novel.
[00:09:12] With his bank robbing history, this certainly seems fitting, appropriate, but it was to be Stalin that stuck.
[00:09:21] After developing his reputation as a ruthless operator, in 1912 he got his first big political job when Lenin asked him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.
[00:09:34] The next few years saw him continue his rise in the Bolshevik party, but the one episode I want to highlight is a brief period in 1913 when he lived in Vienna.
[00:09:47] Amazingly, during his time there he lived in the same part of the city, at the same time, as Hitler, Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud.
[00:09:57] It’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility to imagine that all these four men might have even been in the same cafe at the same time, completely unknown to each other.
[00:10:10] Shortly after returning from Vienna, he was arrested and sent to Siberia, where he was exiled for four years.
[00:10:18] When he eventually got out, in 1917, he returned to St Petersburg and found a revolutionary energy rippling across the country.
[00:10:28] The events of the next few years not only altered Russian history forever, but the political fortunes of Stalin himself, as he went from a respected and committed political operator on the ground to the inner circle of Bolshevik power.
[00:10:46] When the Russian Revolution began in November 1917, Stalin was active as both a political and military leader. He fought in the Russian Civil War, and took up important ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government.
[00:11:02] His reputation continued to grow after he helped Lenin to escape from the Tsar’s army into Finland, and as a reward he was brought into the inner circle of Bolshevik party power.
[00:11:15] Yet, despite his important role in the revolution, Stalin hadn’t established himself as a charismatic speaker, or someone with leadership potential.
[00:11:26] In his memoirs of the revolution, the historian Nikolai Sukhanov, described Stalin as "a grey blur, emitting a dim light every now and then and not leaving any trace."
[00:11:41] Despite his lack of charisma, his dullness, at the 11th Party Congress in 1922, Lenin nominated Stalin as the party's new General Secretary, and this gave him the chance to appoint his own staff - and those loyal to him - through the party and build up his own power base.
[00:12:01] Stalin loyalists were generally newer Communist Party members, often from working-class or peasant backgrounds like he was, as opposed to the "Old Bolsheviks" who were generally more middle class and university educated.
[00:12:17] Then, in January 1924, Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, died.
[00:12:25] He failed to nominate a successor, and as a result his death set in motion a prolonged period of ruthless political manoeuvring.
[00:12:35] Stalin tried desperately to position himself, but there was another, more charismatic candidate, the leader of the Red Army and Stalin’s long time rival, Leon Trotsky.
[00:12:48] Now, there have been entire books written on why Stalin beat Trotsky to the top job, but suffice it to say that it was a combination of trickery, Trotsky’s over confidence, and Stalin’s ruthlessness.
[00:13:03] By 1926, Stalin’s supporters had voted Trotsky out of the Politburo, then the Communist Party in 1927, and then from the entire country in 1929.
[00:13:17] But Stalin wasn’t content to let his enemies and rivals simply “leave” the country and live out the rest of their lives in peace.
[00:13:26] In 1936, Trotsky was granted political asylum in Mexico but was found guilty of treason in a Soviet court during Stalin’s purge of his political opponents.
[00:13:38] And he certainly wasn’t safe in Mexico.
[00:13:41] On the 20th of August, 1940, he was murdered on Stalin’s orders, with an ice-pick no less, making clear that you could never escape from Joseph Stalin.
[00:13:53] After seeing off, or dealing with, several challenges to his power from factional groups within the party and arresting, exiling or murdering any remaining rivals, by 1929 Stalin had established himself as the supreme leader of the party, dictator of the Soviet Union, and a man with a violent sense of revenge.
[00:14:18] With the political infighting behind him and his power firmly established, Stalin began to focus on domestic policy.
[00:14:27] What would come of the revolution, and Lenin’s legacy?
[00:14:31] What would Stalin do with all that revolutionary energy?
[00:14:35] Well, in the late-1920s, the Soviet Union was still an incredibly poor, agrarian society.
[00:14:43] If the Soviet Union did not grow and modernise, Stalin feared, communism would collapse and the country would be overrun by capitalists.
[00:14:54] He put into place a series of 5-year-plans, huge national initiatives to grow and modernise the economy, with the objective of turning it into a modern industrial powerhouse.
[00:15:08] After a promising start, including huge increases in coal, oil, and steel production, it became clear that these plans were terribly flawed.
[00:15:20] The “central planning” and “collectivisation” of this period caused food shortages and famines, and there was a massive human cost to Stalin’s initiatives.
[00:15:32] In the first five-year-plan alone, it’s estimated that up to 8 million people died.
[00:15:40] Stalin was aware of this, of course, but appears to have concluded that this was the acceptable human cost to pay for the modernisation of the Soviet Union.
[00:15:52] There’s a quote that is often attributed to Josef Stalin, of “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”.
[00:16:01] Now, there is actually no historical evidence that he said this, but his actions certainly suggest that he wouldn’t have disagreed with it.
[00:16:11] And although he was the supreme leader of the country and had already dispatched anyone who dared to oppose him, during the mid-to-late-1930s, Stalin grew increasingly insecure and paranoid in his position.
[00:16:28] He feared that factions of the Communist Party and Army were conspiring, or plotting, against him, and he began a ruthless political purge that made his behaviour in the late-1920s seem tame, or soft.
[00:16:44] From 1936 to 1939, 93 of the Communist Party’s 139 Central Committee members were killed, and 81 of Stalin’s 103 generals and admirals were executed.
[00:17:01] Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, ruled with an iron first and encouraged Soviets to inform on one another, accusing as many as 3 million people of opposing Communism.
[00:17:16] There were extensive show trials, theoretically “free” trials of political opponents, but they were essentially predetermined public trials of anyone who opposed Stalin, which would almost always result in the execution of the guilty party.
[00:17:34] And for those simply sent away, most were sent to the gulag, a collection of labour camps in Siberia, where it’s thought that around 750,000 people were killed.
[00:17:47] Now we should move from Stalin’s domestic policy to his foreign, and perhaps the thing - besides the famines and purges - that he is most remembered for, the Second World War, and the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazism.
[00:18:03] Now, as you’ll know, Hitler and Stalin were initially allies, or at least, not enemies.
[00:18:11] On the 24th of August, 1939, shortly before the Nazis marched into Poland, Hitler and Stalin made a non-aggression agreement, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
[00:18:24] Put simply, this meant that the Soviets and Germans agreed not to attack one another and that they would divide the countries between them, carving up Poland.
[00:18:37] This “non-aggression” would last almost two years, before Hitler decided to go back on the pact, launching the invasion of Russia with Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941.
[00:18:51] And he caught the Soviets by surprise, completely unprepared. Stalin had reportedly been advised as early as 1940 that the Nazis had been planning to invade, but had shrugged off these warnings.
[00:19:07] He was furious at Hitler's betrayal but did nothing, or very little at least, for a few days.
[00:19:15] As Stalin hid away and thought about what to do next, the Soviet Union waited as the Nazi army advanced towards Moscow.
[00:19:26] Now, as you may know, this turning on the Soviet Union was to be a grave error of judgement on Hitler’s part, a decision that changed the course of World War II, and with it, world history.
[00:19:40] Suffice it to say that it was hugely bloody, with the Battle of Stalingrad killing a staggering 19,000 people a day, a total of 1.2 million people
[00:19:53] Eventually, as you will know, it proved to be too much, and the Soviets were able to push the Nazi forces all the way back to Berlin in 1945, resulting in the eventual surrender of the German army.
[00:20:07] OK, that is a whistle stop tour of the Second World War, but we must leave time for the postwar era, the era where Stalin went from ally of the West to public enemy number one.
[00:20:21] It’s important to remember Stalin’s early years, and his dedication to the socialist cause. Yes, he had allied with the Allied forces, including Britain and the United States, but he believed in a vastly different ideological system.
[00:20:39] They were allies in name only, and with their mutual enemy Adolf Hitler out of the picture, there was the question of how to rebuild, and how to divide, the remains of Europe.
[00:20:52] Stalin sensed his opportunity.
[00:20:55] He demanded that the countries surrounding the Soviet Union should become socialist satellite states, swallowing up much of Eastern Europe into the USSR, and putting up what Winston Churchill would call an “iron curtain” between the USSR and the rest of Europe.
[00:21:13] After all of this territorial expansion, Stalin found himself ruling over almost 200 million people living in the USSR.
[00:21:23] He was more popular than ever, after having defeated the Nazis, but he was still deeply nervous and paranoid about his position.
[00:21:32] Literally millions of people were imprisoned or executed, and by one estimate, by 1953 three percent of the entire USSR population was imprisoned.
[00:21:47] 1953 would be an important year for Stalin for another reason, though.
[00:21:53] Stalin had always enjoyed a drink, he had been a heavy drinker, and had reportedly stayed up until 3am in 1942 with Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister.
[00:22:05] But on the 5th of March, 1953, at the age of 74, it seemed he couldn’t keep up.
[00:22:12] He had been drinking heavily, and the following day, when his attendants came into his room, they found him sprawled out on the floor.
[00:22:22] Initially, they thought he was just in a bad way after drinking lots of alcohol, but it turned out that he had had a huge stroke.
[00:22:33] On 6 March 1953, the announcement went out to the people of the Soviet Union.
[00:22:40] Josef Stalin was dead.
[00:22:44] It was, to state the obvious, a monumental event.
[00:22:48] He had held an iron grip on the country for almost 30 years, enacting huge changes on the country.
[00:22:56] And now he was gone.
[00:22:59] In the aftermath of his death, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced him.
[00:23:04] He criticised the cult of personality that Stalin had created, his totalitarianism, the gulags, the executions, imprisonment and torture of political opponents, blaming Stalin for the millions of young Soviets who had died at war, and the millions that had starved because of his disastrous agricultural policies.
[00:23:27] And he pledged to start the "de-stalinization" of the country, a process that some might argue has never really finished. Indeed, Vladimir Putin has, in recent years, gone on a campaign to rehabilitate Stalin, and clearly his invasion of Ukraine at the start of 2022 shows Stalin-like expansionist tendencies.
[00:23:51] Now, when it comes to any assessment of the legacy of Joseph Stalin, on one level, it's a complicated one.
[00:24:00] Especially in the immediate aftermath of his death, to many within the Soviet Union he was remembered as a great leader who modernised the country, taking it from a backward, feudal economy into an industrial and military power capable of defeating Hitler.
[00:24:19] To much of the rest of the world, however, he is remembered as a ruthless dictator, a man who some historians have said bears personal responsibility for the deaths of 20 million people.
[00:24:34] He is a man who, with his favourite little blue pencil, would stay up late into the night and then write “execute them all” on an official document, with one stroke of his pencil committing tens of thousands of people to their deaths.
[00:24:50] No matter what his intentions might have been, it’s clear that he was a man who was prepared to murder, torture and sacrifice millions of Soviets - whether it be people starving to death in famine, or even his own son - to get what he wanted.
[00:25:10] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on Joseph Stalin, one of the twentieth-century’s most ruthless leaders and part one on our mini-series on dictators.
[00:25:20] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Stalin, or this was the first time you’d really got into his story, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:25:30] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:25:34] If you live in the former USSR, how did you learn about Stalin in school?
[00:25:39] How do you think the legacy of Joseph Stalin is still felt today?
[00:25:44] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:25:47] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
