In short
Why Vladimir Putin’s Russia is reviving Stalin’s image, sparked by a new Moscow metro relief replica of a 1960s teardown, and what Stalin’s rise was really like in Part 1.
Guests/backgrounds
No guests appear in this excerpt; hosts are Anita Arnon and William de Rumpel. They reference author/historian Anne Applebaum (Red Famine) and biographer Robert Service, plus filmmaker Oliver Stone.
Key claims
Putin argues Stalin was an “effective manager” and that “excessive demonization” attacks Russia; he compares Stalin to Britain’s tolerance of Cromwell. Stalin’s birthdate was falsified (1878 vs 1879) possibly to dodge conscription. Stalin’s childhood featured an abusive alcoholic father, smallpox pockmarks, and a broken nose/arm injury.
Notable examples
Stalin’s seminary poetry (“Flower, oh my Georgia”), taking the outlaw name “Koba” from The Patricide, watching public hangings, the failed 1907 bank robbery (notes’ serial numbers circulated), and his rise via Lenin’s attention to his organizing and writing on the national question.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOStalin's Revival in Modern Russia
2:14 to 2:24
Discussion on Putin's re-introduction of Stalin's image in contemporary Russia.
“Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.”
Stalin's Revival in Modern Russia
2:38 to 6:28
Discussion on Putin's re-introduction of Stalin's image in contemporary Russia.
“And it was an exact replica, one that had been torn down in the 1960s at a time when the Soviet Union was desperately trying to put Stalin and everything he represented far behind it.”
The Origins of Stalin: A Complicated Birth
6:28 to 8:36
Exploration of Stalin's ambiguous birth date and early life in Georgia.
“So we're going to start with something a bit strange because we don't actually know for certain when Stalin was even born.”
Childhood Struggles: Stalin's Early Trauma
8:36 to 11:47
Detailing Stalin's abusive upbringing and health challenges during childhood.
“Limerick or, you know, choose your remote part of Ireland coming to power in London.”
The Influence of Family on Stalin's Development
11:47 to 14:01
Examining the impact of Stalin's family dynamics on his later life.
“It's little boys having to assert himself in a very violent world.”
Stalin's Childhood Hardships
14:01 to 15:02
Explore the brutal challenges Stalin faced in his early life.
“because he'd he'd fallen under a cart or something and broken his broken his nose what happened well Well, it was worse than that.”
The Early Literary Aspirations of Stalin
16:42 to 19:29
Discover Stalin's poetry and his early ambitions influenced by his mother.
“Well, in the first half, we got a very clear picture of Stalin's rough and provincial childhood with a drunken and abusive father.”
Stalin's Path to Banditry
19:36 to 24:15
Learn about the events leading Stalin to embrace a life of crime.
“And it is, by all accounts, quite a brutal regime.”
From Failed Bandit to Bolshevik
24:15 to 28:00
Examine how Stalin's failed criminal endeavors shaped his political journey.
“And it is just the most useless attempt at being a bandit.”
Stalin's Early Years and Bolshevism
28:00 to 29:44
Learn about Stalin's early life, his involvement with the Bolsheviks, and their radical beliefs.
“This is nearly 40 years before the Russian Revolution.”
Show all 12 chapters
The Dynamics of Power in Bolshevism
29:44 to 31:20
Explore the contrasting roles of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin during the Russian Revolution.
“which is a precursor to the Communist Party.”
Stalin's Rise in the Revolution
31:20 to 32:43
Discover how Stalin's organizational skills played a crucial role behind the scenes during the revolution.
“While Trotsky and Lenin are out there sort of rallying people to come rise up, rise up, he's not really there.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01Anita Anand:I'm not giving up. I am selling the building.
0:06William Dalrymple:The final season of FX is the Bear.
0:09Anita Anand:The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX is the Bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. The Colonel's cooked up a new$10 bucket of the day just for you. Monday, 10 wings for$10. Tuesday, 8-piece fried chicken for$10. Wednesday, 8 tenders for$10. Thursday, 10 wings for$10. Friday, 24 nuggets for... Ooh, you guessed it, didn't you? $10. The$10 bucket of the day deal. Every weekday, only at KFC. It's finger-lickin' good. Prices and participation vary while supplies last night. available on third-party ordering platforms, TaxExtra.
0:59Anita Anand:This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods, sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation and that no longer need happen ever again because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo! It records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards.
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2:23William Dalrymple:Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.
2:27Anita Anand:And me, William de Rumpel.
2:29William Dalrymple:We are doing a story about a man who is in the news again, having sort of been disappeared for decades. So in May 2025, a new relief carving of Joseph Stalin went up in a station on the Moscow metro. And it was an exact replica, one that had been torn down in the 1960s at a time when the Soviet Union was desperately trying to put Stalin and everything he represented far behind it.
2:58Anita Anand:Now, Anita, you very sweetly sent me a picture of this new relief. And it's bonkers because it's not in any even remotely contemporary style. It's pure 1920s Soviet kitsch that looks almost balletic with sort of Stalin, who's about three times life size, towering above a group of adoring schoolchildren who appear to be sort of dancers in the Bolshoi. And Stalin's standing there with his hand on his chest, rather like certain images of Bertie Worcester standing against a fireplace in the Drones Club. What on earth is going on and why is Putin indulging Stalin in this way?
3:37William Dalrymple:Okay, so you think it's giving Bertie Worcester vibes. I think it's just a lot more, you know, fatherland, fatherland, you know, that scene from that cabaret. Because, you know, all the kids are, you know, sort of reaching up as if he's kind of godlike. and it's a really good question why is Putin putting him back well because and you know what he has said this uh when when speaking to Oliver Stone the filmmaker in 2017 and he was he was talking you know Stone just asked him straight out why are you bringing Stalin back and turning him into granddad Joe you know sort of making the nation's grandfather and he said to Oliver Stone excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia So he has sort of conflated in his mind the fact that, you know, we've apologised too much about the past.
4:28William Dalrymple:We have apologised too much about strongmen. And we've said this before. Putin has modelled himself and has always said the people he looks up to are Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Stalin. You know, these are the sort of the role models of the strong man.
4:45Anita Anand:Who between them are responsible for lakes of bloodshed stretching across the steps. But what's interesting here to me is that it isn't as if Putin denies the death and the horror of which, you know, there is so very much. He just says that Stalin was an effective manager, which is also... Yeah, that phrase.
5:08William Dalrymple:So, no, the phrase itself is in Russian history textbooks, an effective manager. And it is, it's kind of the mildest description for a man who, as you say, you know, lakes of blood, ran a famine and a terror that killed on most serious counts somewhere between 15 and 30 million people.
5:29Anita Anand:And if you'd like to know more about that, you can listen to our wonderful friend Anne Applebaum in our Russian series from two years ago, drawing on her Pulitzer Prize winning book on the Red Famine.
5:44William Dalrymple:Putin's other argument, by the way, is also interesting, particularly, I guess, for an Empire audience, because he said, look, Stalin, Oliver Cromwell, you know, Britain still has statues of Cromwell, despite what Putin called his very ambiguous role in our history. So if Britain can live with Cromwell on a plinth, the logic runs that Russia can live with Stalin on a plinth. So, you know, that is the argument.
6:08Anita Anand:That's a good counter-argument, because certainly from an Irish point of view, Cromwell is someone who was, again, responsible for locks of blood across Ireland.
6:19William Dalrymple:Shall we start? Because what we're trying to do, as we did with the Mao series that we did, is sort of getting under the bonnet of who this man was, and then what he did. So we're going to start with something a bit strange because we don't actually know for certain when Stalin was even born. There's a parish register of the Assumption Church in Gori that gives the 18th of December 1878 as his birth date. That date is confirmed on a seminary certificate and it's on a czarist police file, we'll come to that in a minute, and in his own handwriting on a 1920s questionnaire. But Stalin himself, when he came to power, gave another birthday, which was celebrated as, you know, Stalin's birthday, let's have a parade, the 21st of December 1879, a year and three days difference.
7:07William Dalrymple:So why did he do it?
7:09Anita Anand:The great Bob Service has an idea, doesn't he? In his biography, he has this nice little line, falsification came easily to him, which is certainly a theme we'll see running through this entire series.
7:23William Dalrymple:Yeah, but he also has another theory, which you can't prove, but I think he makes a really compelling argument that changing the date helped him dodge the draft, dodge conscription when he was a young man. So, look, we don't know for sure. There are some things we do know for sure. We know he wasn't born Stalin. He was born Joseph Jugashvili, and he was born in Georgia. So, he's a Georgian, and that's very, very different to being a Russian at the time when he was born.
7:51Anita Anand:When I was growing up and studying Stalin for A-level, it didn't mean much to me, the fact that he came from Georgia, because it just looked as if in those days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if it was, you know, part of southern Russia, certainly the southern USSR. But it's worth giving this history. Georgia is in the Caucasus, it's next to Armenia, It's just north of Iran and Turkey, and it's a very long way from Russia. The religion of Georgia is Georgian Orthodox. It's different from Russian Orthodox. And for a Georgian to rise to power in Moscow and someone from a Georgian Orthodox background is as improbable as in mid-20th century Britain, someone with an Irish Catholic background from Limerick or, you know, choose your remote part of Ireland coming to power in London.
8:50Anita Anand:It's improbable.
8:51William Dalrymple:And Georgia has its own language. It has its own alphabet. So, it's very different and distinct. And so, for Georgians, when they were, you know, sort of being run from Moscow, it was as if that, you know, they'd been colonized and some people didn't like it at all, never came to terms with it.
9:10Anita Anand:And perhaps one other thing we should say is that in distant ancient times, Georgia was actually part of the Persian Empire. I mean, you know, that's the, you know, it's looking southwards to Mesopotamia rather than necessarily northwards to Russia for much of its history. So it's a long, long way from Moscow Central.
9:32William Dalrymple:Well, I mean, that's sort of the slightly uneven terrain of geopolitics. Let's talk about the uneven terrain of his childhood because it is miserable, Willie. I mean, it's so awful. So his father, Bessarian, known as Besso, was a cobbler. So this is a poor family. And he had his own workshop in Gori in Georgia. And by most accounts, he was a pretty good cobbler. But what he refused to do was keep up with the times. So he kept on making sort of old Georgian style footwear, you know, sort of the soft leather, the high boots, the kind of things the Cossacks would wear very proudly. But the taste changed.
10:15William Dalrymple:What people wanted was the European shoes. So, instead of actually thinking, maybe I should move with the times, Besso just became really bitter and angry and alcoholic. And his drinking brought with it violence. And the violence was directed mostly at his poor wife, Kiki Ekaterina, and against the little boy, Joseph. It is a brutal, horrible way to grow up. I mean, Besso was so sort of angry with his lot that he was known as Mad Besso. Robert Service, again, in a very excellent biography on Stalin, says he got into scrapes when his businesses went into decline. You can just imagine this man who comes out him punchy and drunk.
11:00William Dalrymple:And there is a story that Stalin himself tells to his daughter, Svetlana. And please keep that name in mind because we're going to do a bonus episode on Stalin's daughter. It is the most bonkers, extraordinary story you can possibly imagine. But he does tell the story to his daughter that once his father was so drunk and he sort of came across him battering his mother and he picked up a knife. He hurls this knife at his father. It misses his father. But then his father comes charging towards him and he goes and runs away to the neighbours and hides for days till his father's anger blows out. So, that's the kind of terror that this kid grows up with.
11:43William Dalrymple:It's a horrible, abusive background. And finally, the father, be grateful for small mercy's leaves, which doesn't make you know Ekaterina's life Keke's life much better but it does mean there's
11:56Anita Anand:less brutality in the home Anita you sent me um a picture of Stalin as a little what is it six year old seven year old and he is this sort of you can see he's this sort of abused kid he looks like a little punk from you know from some east end um uh picture of young east end gangsters he's He's tiny, he's got jug ears sticking out, and he's jutting his chin forward assertively as if, you know, he's sort of prematurely tough. There's no love there. It's little boys having to assert himself in a very violent world.
12:35William Dalrymple:I see someone really fragile. You see someone who's a little thug. I just see somebody who just needs a hug. I mean, you know, the eyes are sad eyes, but that's, you know, that's the difference between us. But you're right about him being quite thuggish because he does. As a kid, he's small. He's really small, which is why that Moscow freeze is really funny where he's three times as big as anybody else because he was short all his life. He was always one of the shortest men in the room. The thing is, this is a kid who goes through quite a lot. So, his father then leaves. Ekaterina is struggling to bring up this quite wayward kid by the time Besso has left, who is now having brawls and fights and things like that.
13:17William Dalrymple:Around the age of six, he gets smallpox that is so severe that his mother thinks that little Joseph is going to die. Already two of his older brothers have died in infancy. There's a real terror and poverty because she can't afford a doctor. Instead, they call in this local healer. Not much good from a local healer. He survives, but he is left permanently pockmarked. Every official photo you've ever seen of him willy has been retouched yeah it's not something you see much in
13:49Anita Anand:in europe or america these days but in india where i live that you still see in bazaars people with really really bad disfigured smallpox marks it looks like a you know battlefield with little shell holes in your in your uh in your cheeks and and temples it wasn't the only thing was it because he'd he'd fallen under a cart or something and broken his broken his nose what happened well
14:11William Dalrymple:Well, it was worse than that. It is like being hit by a car as the equivalent. So, you know, there was a runaway horse and carriage that slammed straight into him and they, you know, break his arm. His left arm never properly healed and it was always visibly shorter and stiffer for the rest of his life. So, you know, he went through that as well and was trampled to death. But this is a kid that doesn't die. You know, the pox doesn't take him. This father's brutality doesn't take him. This horse and carriage doesn't take him. Going back to this idea of why he might have turned out the way he did, all he knows in his childhood is kind of hardship and brutality, except for the love of his mother, who he is utterly devoted to.
14:57William Dalrymple:And she has got some really ambitious plans for him. Join us after the break and we'll tell you more.
15:10Anita Anand:I'm not giving up. I am selling the building.
15:15William Dalrymple:The final season of FX is the bear.
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16:42Anita Anand:Welcome back. Well, in the first half, we got a very clear picture of Stalin's rough and provincial childhood with a drunken and abusive father. uh and he should i say disagreed on on the little picture of him which which my view shows a little sort of punk with a jutting chin anita sees a baby longing to be mothered uh but the the sensitive side is there and uh it emerges clearly more i suppose towards the end of his teens when two things happens one is he starts to write really quite good poetry and the second thing improbably for anyone that knows the latest Stalin. He joins a seminary. He trains for the priesthood.
17:23Anita Anand:Anita, take us there.
Read the full transcript
17:24William Dalrymple:Well, shall I read you a bit of Stalin poetry? Shall I? Okay, and you judge for yourself. Okay, here we are. This is from his... In Georgia, I hope. No. Morning. The pinkish bud has opened, tushing to the pale blue violet, and stirred by a light breeze, the lily of the valley has bent over the grass. Flower, oh my Georgia. Let peace reign in my native land and may you friends make renowned our motherland by study. Now that tells you two things, okay? One, and I'm told that in the original Georgian, this is quite beautiful. But number two, he is a proud Georgian. Not a Russian, not this sort of amorphous kind of identity that perhaps the Tsar would like to have.
18:11William Dalrymple:But he is a Georgian. And like many Georgians, proud of that identity, proud of that difference, that separation that you were talking about, looking used to it, feeling different.
18:20Anita Anand:Can I just put in here the thought that in a previous episode last year, we had MyJazNav talking about Conrad and Conrad's father at exactly this period in Poland, which is another place that's under Russian control. and Conrad's father is shoved into the main prison in Warsaw for writing poetry, not a million miles from this, talking about the young Poland rising up and the importance of the motherland. I mean, this presumably is not just patriotic, it's on the verge of transgressive seditious in Tsarist speak.
19:03William Dalrymple:I suppose one cover for any kind of sedition is, again, Kiki, Katerina, his mother, because, you know, she wants him to rise in the ranks and the best way of doing that. And this will make sense to a good Catholic boy.
19:15Anita Anand:You love a good, ambitious mother, Anita.
19:17William Dalrymple:Well, I recognize the breed, but she wants him to be a priest. And she is actually very devout. She's Georgian Orthodox. And she wants young Joseph to become a priest. If only he's a clever boy, if only he could become a priest and he could stay out of trouble, he could rise in the ranks, he could have security. And in 1894, young Joseph, Jugashvili, wins this place at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. And it is, by all accounts, quite a brutal regime. It is one of those places that is set up to Russify, to make more Russian, some of these sort of savage outposts of the Tsar's empire.
19:56Anita Anand:So, Nita, that surprises me only in that you'd imagine that just as the Greek Orthodox Church was the great crucible that forms Greek Orthodox resistance to the Ottomans. You'd imagine that the Georgian Orthodox Church was also a centre of resistance to Russification, but you're saying the opposite is true.
20:17William Dalrymple:Yeah, no, you could assume that if the Tsar hadn't taken control of every little thing and used these places. So, you know, in name on the door, it's Georgian Orthodox, but the Georgian Orthodox Church and the seminary in particular are under Russian Orthodox control at this time.
20:35Anita Anand:Important distinction. How interesting.
20:37William Dalrymple:Very important. Yeah, and glad you asked. So, there is this Russifying, you know, that is going on, which, you know, imagine what that does and how that grates against the little boy who wrote the poem about Georgia, my flowering Georgia and all of that kind of thing. In fact, you know, the pupils… My flowering Georgia.
20:53Anita Anand:He's like one of our characters from the LSD revolution. Can I just say, I don't write the poetry here.
20:59William Dalrymple:I leave that to tell us to do. But this is a place that does surveil its own pupils. So, I mean, this place, apart from, you know, being, you know, the rustification of this outpost of Georgia, it's also quite a pressured existence because all the young minds that are in here are being surveilled like crazy. You know, reports are being written back. Are they good? Are they good czarist members or are they not? Are they, you know, are they talking sedition? And right under their noses, it's at this point that young Joseph is reading books that actually the Tsar and all the people who hold his empire up would have been appalled by.
21:38William Dalrymple:So Marxism gets to him.
21:40Anita Anand:It sounds to me as if the surveillance in the Georgia North. Not very good. Is not quite good enough. It's not great.
21:47William Dalrymple:So he's reading books that are banned. They're on the banned list. What is to be done? You know, it's the big questions of what is to be done about freedom and what is to be done about the individual. There's another interesting one, and I'll tell you why it's interesting. It's just because of the name of the protagonist. It is a Georgian novel, again, it's on the band list, called The Patricide by Alexander Kaspegi. And its hero is this mountain outlaw called Koba. Now, you know that word, don't you? How do you know that word? Tell me how you know that word.
22:20Anita Anand:I do know that because one of my favourite authors, Martin Amis, wrote a book about Stalin called Cobra the Dread because he took on that as his nom de guerre, didn't he?
22:30William Dalrymple:He took it on and it becomes his name in seminary. So, the friends that he's hanging out with, they all talk to him and they say, Cobra this, Cobra come here, Cobra, we're late for matins or whatever it is they were late for. But it does become his name, but then he becomes the thing the name represents. So, this is one of those weird things where you get nominative determinism, So he takes on the name Koba, the name of this bandit hero of a book.
23:00Anita Anand:Brilliant name for a man at seminary studying for the priesthood.
23:04William Dalrymple:But guess what happens next? He becomes a bandit. And it is one of the most improbable, implausible stories of him becoming a bandit. So to understand, first of all, you have to understand a little bit about the atmosphere in Georgia. Because to become a bandit, to steal from the Tsar, as you said, this kind of sedition, it's not taken lightly. Even you write Polish poetry, you end up like Conrad's dad in a prison. But the anger that's building up in Georgia is because around about the time when he's at the seminary, there are two mountain bandits who are condemned for shooting a policeman over a stray cow.
23:45William Dalrymple:It's a small thing, but they are publicly hanged in the centre of Gori. And that has a huge impact on young Stalin because he's there to watch. He's been told not to go, but he goes and he watches and it lights this fire in him. So, rather than thinking, okay, the state is all powerful, we can't do this, we can't rise above this, he decides to meet it head on and become a bandit himself. And it is just the most useless attempt at being a bandit.
24:20Anita Anand:Is he still at seminary at this point?
24:22William Dalrymple:He's left. He's just left seminary and he hasn't completed the course.
24:27Anita Anand:Has he formally sort of bailed out or is he still sort of, you know, in a cassock somewhere?
24:32William Dalrymple:He just didn't. He didn't come back. No. I mean, he's done with it. He's completely done with it. Well, not only does he leave the seminary, he gets married in 1906. You know, it's sort of around the time that he leaves the seminary. He marries a woman called Ekaterina, known as Kato. and you know she's also a very devout Georgian woman she's a sister of a seminary friends of his and you know there could have been a happily ever after there their son is born in 1907 a little boy called Yakov and just you know keep that name in your mind as well because you know these kids stories are not happy ones and we'll come to them a bit later but there's in that same year 1907 this is when he decides old Koba stroke Stalin stroke Jagashvili decides that he's going to do a bank robbery.
25:16William Dalrymple:Even after watching these two people being hanged in the public square, he's going to have a go. So, he and a bunch of his friends ambush a bank stagecoach in Erevan Square in Tiflis. And it is almost within sight of the seminary itself. And it is an audacious thing where they're sort of standing on high buildings and they're dropping bombs and others have been positioned on the street and they open fire with guns. And the man who's pulling all the strings is Stalin, alias Koba, the organiser, the financier, the one who leads the attack.
25:48Anita Anand:This is brilliant. Things you learn in seminary in Tbilisi.
25:55William Dalrymple:Well, it doesn't make you think he's not been reading the Bible very much. But what happens is it's an utter disaster. They make off with a significant sum, it's a quarter of a million rubles that they carry off in linen bags but they cannot spend a single ruble of it because the bank had circulated the serial numbers of the largest notes so you know anytime anyone would have paid for anything with any of those notes they would have been done and so you know it's around this time that he gets his first mugshot he's sort of like he's rounded up but not imprisoned
26:27Anita Anand:for this i mean he kind of gets away with this now i happen to know anita that this is one of your favourite pinups. So what's happened to the boy with the pot marks and the broken nose? He's now become rather dishy.
26:39William Dalrymple:Do you mean the frore mugshot as I like to think of it? I do. Alex von Tinselman will completely be with me on this because we've had a discussion of dictators who were hot ones and he's top of the list. Okay. The young Stalin was a good looking fella.
26:57Anita Anand:Yeah. And he's got quite good hair. He's got sort of sweat back hair and he's almost wearing something that looks a bit like a sort of keffiyeh. He looks he's on a free Palestine march.
27:05William Dalrymple:Yeah. Yeah. So the question I think you could legitimately ask is how can this rather failed bandit become something very important in the Bolshevik movement? And it is really because of a relationship with Lenin. And why don't you tell people a little bit about Lenin? Because he's a very different character to Stalin.
27:27Anita Anand:So Lenin is a different character and a different figure. He comes from a Russian middle-class family. The key event in his childhood is 1887, when his older brother is hanged for trying to kill the Tsar. And this, of course, radicalizes the younger brother. He is expelled from university for going on too many protests. He's even exiled into Siberia in the 1890s. So he's really considered to be one of the kind of leading radicals of this early period. This is nearly 40 years before the Russian Revolution. He's already been exiled to Siberia. And he's already the leader of the radical Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
28:16Anita Anand:Now, I'd always assumed that Bolsheviks were strictly part of the kind of Marxist world. But here it seems to be part of a social democrat sort of political party. Explain that to me.
28:28William Dalrymple:It is a radical wing of an umbrella organization that feels it can hold all of these different thoughts together. And it will turn out that they are very wrong about that. And Bolshevism will become one of the prime motivations in Stalin's life as well. Because, you know, he's now a young father. He's a failed bank robber. He's not a priest. But he starts writing about what the Bolsheviks are thinking and what they're doing and what this land should be. And they all come to the conclusion that actually all of the oppression, all of the wickedness of the Tsar has to end.
29:06Anita Anand:What I'd love to know is how does Lenin's trajectory, radicalized by his brother's hanging, a very senior figure in exile in Switzerland who's brought back to lead this revolution, how does he come across some provincial bank robber for the Caucasus? What's the circumstances that bring these two men from very different backgrounds and very different parts of Russia together?
29:35William Dalrymple:Well, I mean, the way Stalin will tell it in later years doesn't bear much scrutiny, because the way he tells it, you know, they both skipped into the revolution holding hands. But actually, it was Lenin who became the leader of the Russian Social Democrat Labour Party, which is a precursor to the Communist Party.
29:53Anita Anand:How interesting. It sounds like it's just a sort of soft left sort of SDP or something, but it's actually the Communist Party and it's earlier the caterpillar that became the butterfly.
30:01William Dalrymple:Yeah, exactly. The Bolshevik wing of that is even more radical and that's where Lenin's heart is beating. That's what makes him hugely attractive to Stalin. Stalin knows where the power is because the Bolsheviks form the majority of that party. There are the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Mensheviks are much more the intellectuals and the intelligentsia and the Bolsheviks are much more, pow, let's get this done and let's get it done quickly and it doesn't matter what cost it comes to and it is going to cost rivers of blood. And you've got two very charismatic people on that side, Lenin being the one who is on top and Trotsky being another who's standing on tanks and rallying people to join the cause.
30:45William Dalrymple:But where is Stalin in all of this? Stalin is writing articles about the national question, what is this new place going to be like. And, you know, he comes to the attention of Lenin through that kind of writing and then Lenin sort of, you know, brings him on to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 and notices this man is pretty, you know, organised. He's an organised thinker. He can, you know, sort of do this kind of actually slightly plodding work of organising, making sure funding is in place, you know, that kind of stuff, the backroom kind of stuff. Now, that is what he is doing in 1917.
31:24William Dalrymple:While Trotsky and Lenin are out there sort of rallying people to come rise up, rise up, he's not really there. He's not a good orator. He is not the man who's on the front line. And this is going to be a real problem, Willie, because he would not thank us for talking like this. Indeed, he did not thank Trotsky, who in the next episode that we do will continually point out that the man was a bean counter when everybody was laying down their lives during the glorious revolution and that is going to that's going to sting him so it's one of those occasions
32:00Anita Anand:we've come across several times in this podcast where someone who subsequently becomes terribly famous has his past enhanced in retrospect so we think of stalin as someone central in the Russian Revolution, but he wasn't at all. He was a backroom, as you said, a bean counter. And the real heroes at this point are Lenin and Trotsky.
32:23William Dalrymple:And Trotsky. And very much Lenin and Trotsky. And Stalin is doing, let's face it, the unglamorous work that nobody else wants to do, but it's still important. So he still has a seat at the table. That's all you need to know. He has a seat at the table. So next time on this podcast, Willie, we're going to talk about how someone who is described as a plodding theorist, becomes General Secretary of the newly named Communist Party. And what does that actually mean, that title? Is it actually a job of great power and import, or is it still another title for a job that nobody else wants to do? And what happens with the friendship with Lenin?
33:01William Dalrymple:All of that to come in the next episode. If you want to get the whole series and a special bonus episode about Stalin's daughter eye-watering, involves falling in love with an Indian, many broken hearts defection to America I mean everything is in this story you can go ad free by joining the club at empirepoduk.com that's empirepoduk.com till the next time we meet it's goodbye from me Anita Arnand
33:25Anita Anand:and goodbye from me William Durrenpo
33:34Anita Anand:I'm not giving up I am selling the building
33:38William Dalrymple:the final season of FX is the bear
33:42Anita Anand:The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay... No! Stop! Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX's The Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including unlimited, is$15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash?
34:19Anita Anand:Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.
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34:57William Dalrymple:That's Zazzle.com. Make it z 'amazing.
From the publisher
How did Stalin become one of the most ruthless dictators in World History? What was his childhood like in Georgia? How did he rise from a poet training to be a priest, to the ruler of the Soviet Union?
In Episode 1 of this new series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple explore the early life of Stalin as he grew up in Georgia.
Brought to you by Plaud. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire
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