396. Stalin: The Bolshevik Revolution (Part 2)

21:25But it does give an idea that when Stalin wanted something done, he was absolutely determined that everyone should run around and do it for him.

21:33William Dalrymple:I tell you, we've talked about Mad Besso in the last episode, and I, frankly, I'm not for him. I am against him. But we'll go to the break. And, you know, from one sort of disastrous marriage, which is the marriage of Stalin's parents, we're going to look at another disastrous marriage, which is the marriage of Stalin himself. Join us after the break.

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25:13Anita Anand:welcome back so giles we need to know a little bit more about stalin's love life at this point yes we had his rather disastrous early marriage ekaterina in the last episode tell us about his new love, Nadia. And there's quite an age gap, isn't there? Yes, his new love, Nadezhda, as she is, Aleluyeva, universally known as Nadia, was much, much younger than Stalin. In fact, they met when she was only about 15 or 16, although she'd known him before that because Stalin had been a regular visitor to the household. Remember, Stalin was on the run for many years. He was in and out of prison camps for being a political troublemaker.

25:49And whenever he escaped, which he did quite a number of times actually or was released he tended to end up at the Alleluyeva family so the daughter of the Alleluyeva family who's called Nadia absolutely adored Stalin he was good looking he was in her eyes witty she laughed at all his jokes and rather exciting escaping from prison

26:11Anita Anand:camps and turning up in the middle of the night I mean that's got a certain touch of cloak and

26:14William Dalrymple:dagger about it however if you look at pictures of them together you know in those early days when went to go and stuff they don't look right do they a much older man sort of you know with this you know this is when he's sort of hiding out at the home of her father it just looks all wrong nevertheless okay you know she falls in love it maybe looks all wrong because she's actually only 16 years old she's a teenager um okay maybe that was slightly more acceptable in in that day and age but nevertheless within a couple of years they're essentially living as a couple as husband and wife although there's no record of their marriage at that time and we we believe they got married several years later.

26:50But they're married. And I think right from the beginning, this is probably going to be, we could see it's going to be a troubled relationship. Because Stalin, it would seem, wanted a rather submissive wife who was going to do the shopping, do the cooking, the washing up, clean the household and leave it at that. Nadia was much more ambitious. She was very intelligent. And she wants to get involved in this exciting revolution that's taking place. She wanted to work in confidential roles. She wanted to work on telegrams. And actually, she would end up getting a job working for Lenin in his secretariat.

27:25And I think this didn't quite fit with Stalin's vision for this domestic wife doing all the chores at home. And I think this, from the very outset, this caused big problems in their relationship.

27:39William Dalrymple:It is said that Stalin first noticed her because she was tidy. he liked the way she tidied up around the home and you know that's what really charmed him whereas you know it's all his uniform and boots and all his heroism for him it was she could be

27:53Anita Anand:mrs miggins at home was she capable of um of talking talking him down could she could she um make him do what she wanted or was he very much the dominant older man well he was a dominant older man but she was extremely headstrong and she spoke her own mind uh i'm not sure how that would have gone down in the Stalin household.

28:12William Dalrymple:And actually, you know what, we're going to dwell on this a bit more in a future episode, in the episode about Svetlana, the daughter that is born of this union, because she tells the tale of a feisty mother and just screaming matches between them. And actually, if there's anyone who can talk him down, there's only one person, and it is Svetlana, the daughter. There is a son, Vasily, who's born in March 1921. And this coincides with this stretch where Stalin is unwell, Giles. Tell us a little bit about what is ailing him. He's terrifically unwell. In fact, he's pretty close to death. He has an appendix that bursts and he's seriously ill, has to have a major surgery at around this time.

28:50And this could quite easily have killed him. He pulls through. As you say, Svetlana is born in 1926. She's a fascinating character. I'm glad you're going to be talking about her further Because, of course, she would flee the Soviet Union and take up residence in America. And she'd write a fascinating book called 20 Letters to a Friend about life with a monstrous father and an unhinged mother. Really fascinating stuff. But, you know, on the face of it, the Stalin household is relatively functional. They have their dacha outside Moscow. They would go there on summer evenings and they go and eat there, picnic there.

29:28All their friends would come round. they'd drink, they'd have fun, they'd have barbecues, what have you. And it seems like quite a normal household if you just stepped into it, you know, briefly. And, you know, people drop in Voroshilov, who's going to become a loyal supporter of Stalin. He's often there. Other commissars or men who will become commissars also go there and spend their evenings there. And they also adopt a young lad whose father has been killed in the civil war, or he was killed in a praying crash, actually, I think. And so, you know, on the face of it, this is quite a convivial, gregarious household in which to grow up in.

30:05But as Svetlana will reveal many years later, there are all sorts of very troubling, dark undercurrents taking place.

30:13William Dalrymple:Again, we'll get into that in the next episode. But what we do know is that the front looks pretty good, as you say, you know, nice dasher. And I know how much Willie likes a dasher. But, glam young wife, kids, growing family, all of that kind of thing. And then in April 1922, Stalin is appointed General Secretary. Now, that carries a great deal of weight today, General Secretary of the Communist Party, which normally coincides with being the president of the country or something very high up. Back then, though, it was very much a functional description and it was sort of grindy work that he was expected to do.

30:52Yes, I mean, it was a little bit more than licking stamps and, you know, putting addresses on envelopes, but... Stenographer. What Stalin realised, I think, and this is a sign of Stalin's absolute shrewdness and malevolence, is that he realised that this gave him complete control over the party if he played his cards right. Because what he could do as General Secretary is manoeuvre all his friends and supporters into key positions and get rid of everyone that supported Trotsky and the others. And so from the day he takes that job, he makes the most of it. This is really Stalin. I think he's already got one eye on the future.

31:32Lenin's not particularly well at this point. And he's thinking of, you know, who's going to succeed Lenin? Well, now I've got an extremely good opportunity to fill the party with all my supporters and champions. And that's going to leave me in great stead when Lenin finally, you know, shuffles off.

31:51Anita Anand:Now, you mentioned that Lenin is now getting older and we're heading towards a world where Lenin won't be at the helm anymore. What happens to the relationship of those two men at this period?

32:03William Dalrymple:Because it starts off quite friendly. I mean, he's the kind of person who opens a bottle of wine every time Stalin comes to visit, but it goes really wrong, doesn't it? It really does go wrong. And you're right, they met socially and they get on very well. They'd have friendly chats in the garden and all that sort of stuff, you know. But the relationship gradually falls apart. And I think part of that is because Lenin sees exactly what Stalin's doing. And he's torn, really, between Stalin and Trotsky. These are the only two real possibilities of leadership, you know, when he's no longer there.

32:33And I think he genuinely doesn't know which one he should go for, you know. And the problem is exacerbated, or Stalin exacerbates his own chances, or ruins his own chances, really, when he starts insulting Nadia, which is Lenin's own wife.

32:47William Dalrymple:I think this is actually one of the most interesting things, which is how Stalin is pretty tone deaf and doesn't read a room properly, because Nadia Krupskaya is the love of Lenin's life. He respects her. You know, she's sort of the mother of the party. and he pretty much treats her like crap. Tell us about the actual incident that kind of ruins things and how his failure to apologise destroys that relationship. Yeah, it's an incredible apology letter. What happens is that Stalin calls up the Lenin household. Lenin is very, very sick by this point. And he speaks to Nadia and he accuses her of discussing politics with Lenin as he's on his deathbed.

33:24Says this is an unforgivable thing to do. It's completely outrageous. Really attacks her. And of course, she goes straight back to her darling Lenin and tells him what's happened. And Lenin is absolutely furious. As you say, he's very, very close to his wife and is appalled and disgusted at what Stalin has done. And he insists that Stalin writes a letter of apology. And the letter is brilliant because it's one of those letters where you say sorry by not saying sorry. He sort of says, well, you know, if you think I offended her? Well, then I suppose I'm sorry, but I don't think I actually did. So there's nothing really to be apologetic about.

34:02Fantastic. And of course, this hardly assuages Lenin, who remains completely furious with Stalin.

34:07William Dalrymple:So after that spectacular, sorry, not sorry, Lenin now has got very little time for Stalin. And he writes actually this in 1923, on the 4th of January, this sort of pen portrait of Stalin, which tells you what he's thinking. Stalin is too crude. And with this defect, which is wholly bearable inside our media and in relations among ourselves, it becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin and in his place, appoint someone else. Now that's a big deal because for ages, you know, they've tolerated Stalin. They've kept him in position because he balances out Trotsky.

34:53William Dalrymple:But this seems to be the first time he's saying, get rid of him. He was rude to my wife. Get rid of him. Yes, he was rude to my wife. This is extraordinary. But I think, draw your attention to the very last words you read of the quote there. In his place, appoint someone else. He could have so easily said, in his place, appoint Trotsky, but he doesn't. Because the fact is, by this point, he also mistrusts Trotsky. He doesn't know what Trotsky will do if he takes over from Lenin. What are his worries, Giles? What does he think Trotsky might do? I think he thinks he will betray the revolution. He'll take his own path.

35:27The too many ex-Zarists turning up. Too many ex-Zarists. And, you know, I think he's got a reason why he distrusts Trotsky. Trotsky likes his uniforms. He likes, hobnobbing with these rather grand old generals. And so I think Lenin is genuinely worried that this could go badly wrong in the aftermath of his death. So what happens when that letter is delivered? It is sent, isn't it? It is sent, yeah. And Stalin, well, no one acts on it. Because the problem is, by this point, Stalin has been General Secretary for a number of years by this point. He's pulled in all his champions and supporters and place him in positions of power.

36:12So he's become kind of too powerful to be removed. And so we're left, as Lenin is sort of choking on his deathbed and about to expire, we're left with two very powerful figures, each of which is very, very keen to become the new leader of the Soviet Union.

36:32William Dalrymple:Lenin suffers this stroke, which is catastrophic, it ends his political life and then 10 days later, that's it for Lenin. And his wife, Nadia Krupskaya, has one of the most telling lines, I think, in the Stalin story. She says, had Lenin, her husband, not died in 1924, he would be serving time in one of Stalin's prisons. Because she saw the writing on the wall that actually Stalin had it in for Lenin in his rise to the top. And as you say, unremovable, even though the great leader says, I want him gone as general secretary, he would have put him in a gulag had he not been so ill. Do you think that's true, Giles?

37:11Would he have done that? I think there's every chance he would have done because Stalin was absolutely remorseless when he was confronting people he thought were not on his side. And I'd like to draw attention to another thing he did that disgusted Nadia, the grieving widow. All she wanted was for Lenin to be buried. She wanted to have a simple burial, you know, and what Stalin decides, oh no, we're not going to have a burial. What we're going to do is embalm him and preserve him forever and put him on display in Moscow. And so, you know, within hours of Lenin dying, they start draining the fluids from his body.

37:49I mean, this is a really sort of, you know, nasty process. They take out his organs. Incidentally, they lose his heart. His heart was never found again. Is this the kind of thing that they do in Russia at this point? It sounds more like H.D. Jim. Do you know what? I think what Stalin was looking back to his early life, where he was training to become a priest in the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church, of course, venerates relics of saints, particularly bodily remains of saints. And I think Stalin was tapping into this cultural and religious tradition of the Orthodox Church to turn Lenin into a relic.

38:25And of course, Stalin would come back to this in the Second World War, where suddenly he allows all the churches to be reopened as he rediscovers holy patriotic Russia to try and bring the country behind him in the fight against Nazi Germany. So I think this was Stalin thinking, this is a good way, this is a good thing to do with Lenin's body.

38:43William Dalrymple:Can I give you a really genuinely awful, macabre little morsel to go with your story of embalming and upsetting Kripskaya? It's the fact that they found an institute of the brain specifically to slice and study Lenin's brain tissue to hunt for the physical roots of his genius. Isn't that just an extraordinary thing? I can add a little bit more grim detail to that, actually. his brain. They thought that Lenin was a genius and they wanted to discover the source of this genius. They sliced his brain into 30 ,000 wafer-thin segments. They used a machine a bit like when you get Parma ham in the shops and everything.

39:23They did that with Lenin's brain and then they put them between plates of glass. And they brought in a German neurologist called Oskar Voigt, whose task was to study Lenin's brain and find out the root source of his genius. And he spent years looking at these through microscopes and he wrote a 14 volume account of Lenin's brain. Unfortunately, he didn't find anything particularly different about his brain from anyone else's. No signs of this supposed genius.

39:53William Dalrymple:Have either of you seen Embalmed Lenin? Yes, I have. I have too. Yeah, it's not lovely, actually, is it? It's very weird. You queue up, there's all these guards in all their uniforms standing, you know, very erect and everything. And then you file in, file past this sort of slightly yellowing, parchment-y, slightly mouldy. I thought he looked sort of plastic. I thought he had a really shiny dome and he looked really very plastic and not human at all. Looked like some sort of mannequin rather than, you know, an embalmed once human. Well, you clearly saw him on a good day. I caught him on a bad day.

40:28You know, he was looking a bit mouldy. There were bits of specks of black on his forehead when I saw him. So they must have cleaned him up for you. It's a very odd thing to go and see. Actually, Boris Yeltsin wanted to get rid of Lenin. He said that he's done his time. I think we should bury him now. But there was never the sort of political willpower, even in the disintegrating Soviet Union, to put Lenin to bed. And so there he remains. And I can't see Putin getting rid of him either.

40:56Anita Anand:I've got a question, Jaz. we're heading now to the moment where Stalin is going to seize power. Is it still an issue that he's from Georgia? Because we established very much in the first episode that in the Tsarist system, if you are from Poland or from Georgia, from the extremities of the empire, you are effectively a second-class citizen. The new Soviet Republic is different and has a different attitude to the nationalities. But nonetheless, this is a man with a very strong Georgian accent. Russian is still very much his second language. Is there any sense that he's an outsider who people are suspicious of?

41:39Anita Anand:Or has he now been so much at the centre of things that he is the establishment? I think this is very interesting because when the Union of Soviet Socialist republics were set up in 1922, there was a great debate about how power would be shared between all the various republics. And Lenin, his idea was that they should have a sort of equal power base. So they would be run almost along democratic lines, if you like, that they'd each have a say in the running of this great, effectively, an empire. Stalin said, no, Russia should be the dominant partner in all of this. So this is quite unusual and unexpected that Stalin, as you say, Georgian says, no, it's Russia first.

42:20Anita Anand:Who was writing patriotic poetry to his great homeland as a young man. He was, but he nevertheless, I think he saw it was in his interest, certainly politically, to champion Russia in the formation of this new great, great state, if you like. And so, but you're right, he was Georgian through and through. This is one of the reasons why he hated making public speeches, was because he spoke with a very strong Georgian accent. And in fact, perhaps the biggest crisis point of his entire time in power came when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. This is a time surely you'd expect the leader of the country to make an address to the nation.

42:58Stalin didn't do it because he didn't like speaking with his Georgian accent. And he made Molotov, his foreign commissar, address the nation. So, yeah, yeah. Very interesting. He was always conscious that he wasn't a full-blooded Russian by any stretch of the imagination.

43:13William Dalrymple:Look, we're going to end it here. So look, just keep in your mind this funeral that wasn't wanted by the widow of Lenin, that Stalin has kind of bulldozed his way through. One little thing that we haven't added to that is that he has a really dirty trick that he plays on Trotsky. He tells him the wrong dates for the funeral. So Trotsky doesn't end up going to the funeral and is livid about this because he's been shut out of this sort of last respects to the great leader. And we are going to take a closer look at Trotsky in the next episode. how he rose, how he falls out even more spectacularly with Stalin, and how eventually, thousands of miles away, in Mexico, Stalin finally gets the last word.

43:58Anita Anand:And now, if you cannot hold yourself back from second and third courses, head to empirepoduk.com using the link in the episode description to join today.

44:10William Dalrymple:Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.

44:15Anita Anand:And goodbye from me, William Thurimpol.

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