400. Stalin: A Poisonous Legacy (Part 6)

18:02Fiona Hill:But he also kind of thinks about the Russian state in a very different way. There is that element of him. He's not like Trump, for example, or the Sun King or some of the leaders where they say the state is me. He sees himself as a servant of the state. He is very much rooted in an understanding of Russian imperial and Soviet history. And he frames himself in those stories as well. So it's not just he's trying to think about just narrow manipulation of people. He has this kind of sense of what Russia is and what he should be in that context.

18:38William Dalrymple:To understand what drives Putin, And we need to go back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think, as well, because, you know, we've mentioned this already. Putin was a mid-ranking KGB officer, posted to Dresden first, then in communist East Germany. In fact, I have spoken to a journalist when he was very junior, Putin. He used to do raids on cinemas where people were watching movies in the middle of the day when they should have been out working. And, you know, he was one of the people he remembers really acutely, sort of a very young Putin, turfing him out and, you know, threatening to arrest people because they weren't working.

19:09William Dalrymple:They were watching a movie. He then lives through the wall coming down, the crowds coming out, you know, mobs gathering outside his own building where he was, you know, albeit a mid-level king. And at that time, he tells the story of, you know, ringing a local Soviet military unit for protection and being told, in effect, that Moscow wasn't saying anything and that nobody could act without orders. There were no orders coming in. The men with the guns had simply stopped answering. And he watched in that state of being powerless, which I think you can probably read a lot into the way he is now with that state of panic, would we say, or just, you know, disgust that everything has collapsed in minutes.

19:49Fiona Hill:I think he was shocked by that because he had joined the institution of the KGB and the foreign service part of that intelligence service, thinking that this was really, as you suggested, the apex of the whole system. He wanted to, if he was really going to be part of everything, be in the institution that really mattered, that in his view kept everything together and oversaw everything. and then the fact that all that just seemed to just sort of disappear like water into sand I think he just couldn't quite believe it and it gave him a shock and as you said I mean in a lot of the autobiographical material where he talks to journalists and interviews he says that whole idea that Moscow was silent that Moscow suddenly had lost all of its power and that it had seeded the stage just gone off and disappeared was perhaps the most astounding thing that he did had ever experienced up until that point in his life.

20:44Fiona Hill:And I think it does shape that whole idea of a restoration, of putting things back again. And when you see him in those very early stages of being, he's the prime minister for a while, he's the acting president, then he's the full-on president, his whole view is putting the state back, strengthening the state again, and putting at its service all the institutions that he possibly can, which would include the FSB, the successor to the KGB, the Orthodox Church, anything else that he thinks would become a pillar, a fundament for a new foundation for a Russian state. And that's when he also starts reviving dead Tsars and Tsarinas, the people who had presided over the Russian Empire when it was a major player in European affairs.

21:36William Dalrymple:We're going to take a break now, Fiona, but after the break, we can talk about some really very obvious parallels between Putin and Stalin. Those parallels run along the line of assassinations. So join us then.

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25:08Anita Anand:We had earlier in the series a wonderful episode on the murder of Trotsky, the idea that Stalin hunts him down wherever he goes, even as far away as Mexico, that the ice pick finally gets him in the back of the head. This idea that the state will get you if you step out of line. There's quite a line of corpses that have followed Trotsky since Putin came into power.

25:38William Dalrymple:Well, yeah, I mean, you can look at the roll call. So let's remind ourselves, 2006, there was Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer who had turned on the FSB and he dies in London after his tea is laced with radioactive polonium. And then you have a British public inquiry that concludes...

25:55Anita Anand:They're quite imaginative ends, these, aren't they?

25:57William Dalrymple:Well, I mean, they're just ghastly and they have collateral damage, you know. And it's a British public inquiry that concludes the killing was probably approved by Putin. The European Court of Human Rights later found Russia to be responsible. That is the same year. We remember that. That's the same year that the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed the war in Chechnya is shot dead in the lift of her building on Putin's birthday, coincidentally. And then in 2015, you've got the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who's shot four times in the back on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin. In 2018, you've got the Novichok case, which is used on the Skripals in Salisbury, where an Englishwoman, Dawn Sturgis, dies.

26:40William Dalrymple:And And then, of course, you have the most famous of all. You have Alexei Navalny, Putin's bravest domestic opponent. Remind us what happened to him.

26:47Anita Anand:He gets Novichok in his tea as he's about to board a plane. And he actually survives that astonishingly through the plane landing and him ending up very quickly in the hospital. Nonetheless, he goes home and he dies in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024, for a month before an election that Putin was obviously always going to win. Now, the Kremlin denies every one of these corpses, denies it's got anything to do with it, but Putin has never been shy about the principle behind them. Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.

27:24Anita Anand:And it's almost as if he's proud of these murders.

27:27William Dalrymple:Is this Fiona sort of Stalin playbook, you know, the man who will go to the ends of the earth with an ice pick? This is the kind of modelling that's taking place now. And have we had it before with others, you know, the other presidents who went before Putin? Did they indulge in the same thing, but we just weren't looking or we weren't aware or it's just very new?

27:45Fiona Hill:Well, it's as old as time. You know, let's go back to antiquity and see plenty of examples of this. But in more contemporary modern Russia.

27:55Anita Anand:Hannibal fleeing from the Romans and being caught in the Dead Sea.

27:59Fiona Hill:I mean, so many. I mean, you talk about these kinds of episodes on a regular basis. And I'm sure you could come up with a billion examples, you know, if you really kind of put your mind to it. And, you know, we haven't even exhausted all of the examples. I mean, in Russia, a shocking number of people falling out of windows, some of them in hospital and, you know, on kind of strange visits. Some of them in India on holiday. Some of them in India as well. I mean, lots of people coming to bad ends across Europe in places like Spain, you know, for example, and, you know, kind of elsewhere. In the United States, there have been some other kind of cases that have raised a lot of question marks.

28:34Fiona Hill:And of course, then there's Evgeny Prigozhin, you know, at one point, the head of Putin's catering business, who goes into much less savoury work and is the head of the Wagner paramilitary group in charge of bot factories in St. Petersburg and all kinds of manner of errands for Putin, who then engages in an insurgency during a really bleak period in the war on Ukraine, which he gets into a big fight with the Ministry of Defence and starts a march on Moscow, ostensibly to get Putin to get to the war. Putin's attention, but it looks remarkably like a march on Moscow. There's a precursor to a coup.

29:09Fiona Hill:All is forgiven for a while. And then suddenly Prigozhin comes out of the biggest window in the sky when something terrible happens to his plane with all of his friends on it at a time when he's been lulled into obviously a false sense of security. And that's that.

29:21Anita Anand:Were you surprised that he went back at all? I mean, because it seemed that he was destined to fall out of the sky the minute he went back to Russia.

29:31Fiona Hill:Well, he must have been. And this is, you know, what's interesting about Putin is Putin does have incredible powers of persuasion. And, you know, something which goes back to what you were talking about earlier, Willie, about, you know, one of the defining moments of his knowing how to work with people as the case officer, as the operative. And he obviously persuades Prigozhin, after probably yelling at him a bit, that all is fine, all is sort of forgiven in love and war. And Prigozhin obviously believes that there was just no way that he would have got on along with his closest associates onto this plane.

30:02Fiona Hill:So, you know, Putin also makes it very clear that he will wait to the moment of his choosing to take someone else when they least expect it. And I'll be honest, you know, as somebody who's watching Putin, and I don't really like to say this, I was almost in a weird way relieved when this happened because I thought my whole analysis of Putin was completely wrong. It was one of those, you know, pattern breaking events. And I thought, my goodness, he's not going to take Prigozhin out. This must tell us something else about, you know, the system. But then, sure enough, you know, he's taken out of the picture.

30:30Anita Anand:No one was surprised.

30:31Fiona Hill:Yeah, so nobody was surprised. But I guess Mr. Boghossian in the moment was surprised because for Putin, this is what he does. And as you said, he has to make it part of the system that just like Stalin, there's no way you can go without him getting at you. And of course, I mean, the initial efforts to kill Trotsky were to try to shoot him. But the ice pick, you know, probably then just starts to kind of elevate then, you know, these really kind of nasty methods. I mean, Putin has also had Chechen war leaders taken out literally in the toilet or at least in a field toilet with a kind of a precursor of what would now be a drone attack, no doubt.

31:09Fiona Hill:Just all of these kinds of poisoning as well of one of the Chechen leaders through a letter, you know, kind of almost going back to sort of the medieval era.

31:19Anita Anand:He likes a bit of poison, doesn't he? He's fond of a nice chemical end.

31:23Fiona Hill:Exactly. It's meant to be gruesome. That's the whole point of it.

31:27William Dalrymple:Isn't that that phrase, pour encourager des autres? I want everybody else to be afraid to see what could happen. Can we talk about the relationship with Georgia? Because we banged on a lot about Georgia and Stalin. And Gori is still to this day so proud of Stalin. It's got this huge Stalin museum. Great bronze Stalins have come back up. But in August 2008, Putin, who is, you know, the great rehabilitator of Stalin, went to war on Stalin's own homeland. Can you just talk us through what happened there? And because it's one of those episodes that I think people forget in all the other noise that goes on.

32:04William Dalrymple:Technically, at that point,

32:07Fiona Hill:Dmitry Medvedev, who people will now go, who? Talking about historical amnesia, was the president of Russia. So Dmitry Medvedev is still out there, you know, as a kind of almost a cartoon figure of sort of an attack dog for the Russian state, threatening to bomb and annihilate everybody in nuclear war. But he had been, prior to all of this, the prime minister to Putin's president to kind of rob into Putin's Batman, which had actually been encapsulated in one of these reports that ambassadors send back home, for example. And Medvedev had been selected to kind of take charge and take care of the country when Putin switched into the role of prime minister to take a kind of a lesser role and not rupture of the continuity or the rules and regulations of the presidency.

33:00Fiona Hill:Now, of course, Putin was always sitting alongside Medvedev in a kind of learner driver's seat in a car grabbing the steering wheel at different points. So we can assume that Putin had a role in all of this. But the war in Georgia comes against the backdrop of the Olympics in the Summer Olympics in Beijing. We have a kind of a weird split screen as we get later, you know, with all the things that happen in Ukraine and as well of the opening ceremonies, George Bush there, Putin being there, George Bush being at the time the president of the United States. And this incursion into Georgia, because Mikhail Saakashvili, the then president of Georgia, had sparked off a conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia, one of the breakaway republics of Georgia.

33:55Fiona Hill:So, you know, it's all kind of around Stalin's birthplace, gory. Stalin's hometown was actually bombed by the Russian air force in the middle of all this. It's all pretty complicated who started what. But it was clearly that the Georgians and Saakashvili had been lured into, you know, basically a conflict that suited the interests of many people in Russia. Although it's not entirely clear, you know, quite, you know, whether this was going according to plan at the time. I was in the US government. We had a lot of questions about what happened. But basically, it was a lesson again to all of the neighboring states who thought that they could, you know, do their own thing, intervene in affairs at the times of their own choosing.

34:35Fiona Hill:It was a big, strong message from Moscow that Russia was still the boss and that they were not really independent states and there could be an intervention at any moment.

34:44William Dalrymple:You just mentioned about you being in the United States and your very famous testimony, which went viral about this seeming blindness to what Putin's influence was on American policy. We did a series on Yalta and again, we're doing this series on Stalin, so just bringing it back to him. Stalin managed to charm FDR, Roosevelt in Yalta to the point where he really believed everything that Stalin told him. He really believed in this Uncle Joe, Grandpa Joe kind of image that Stalin was presenting to the extent where he often shut out Churchill from very important meetings, which would prove to be catastrophic somewhere down the line.

35:26William Dalrymple:How has this charm offensive between Putin and the United States developed? Is it, I mean, People talk about Trump being under the Putin spell, but I mean, has this sort of been dribbling in for quite some time that people in America have thought, you know what, not Grandpa Putin, but Uncle Vlad. When did it start?

35:47Fiona Hill:Well, it starts really with George W. Bush and the very first meeting that he had with Putin in Slovenia. Putin's obviously done his homework on George Bush and he knows that Bush's religion is very important to him. Bush is a born-again Christian. It helped him get over all kinds of personal problems, including alcoholism, for example. And Putin tells Bush a story. He purports to have been baptised by his mother and his grandmother secretly and that they gave him a cross to wear around his neck. And he tells Bush the story about a fire in his dacha in his country home in which the only thing that survives the fire is this cross.

36:30Fiona Hill:And he pulls the cross out of his shirt to show Bush. And then, you know, after all of this, having charmed Bush and, you know, used religion to bring them together because that's what you do. If you're a case officer, you look for something you have in common that you can build upon. He basically persuades Bush that, you know, the two of them can do business. And at this point, of course, everybody's hoping that we're away from the Cold War standoff. We have a whole series of things where Bush and actually his father, they've all tried to really improve that relationship with Russia. Putin, of course, goes to visit Kennebunkport, the Bush family compound.

37:08Fiona Hill:There's some sort of genuine kind of sense that they might be able to work together there. But basically, Bush says that he got the measure of Putin when he looked into his eyes. Now, a lot of Bush's entourage are kind of rubbing their heads and shaking them in disbelief. And Colin Powell and a few other people are asked later, what did you think, you know, about looking into Putin's eyes? What did you see? And Colin Powell famously says, KGB, KGB, KGB. And much later, when I was actually somebody as a national intelligence officer in the National Intelligence Council to do some deep dives and briefings for Bush, that actually took me to one side and said, look, look, I just want to explain this whole thing, you know, about Vladimir Putin.

37:46Fiona Hill:I just wanted to convey that kind of idea, like Margaret Thatcher had done during the Cold War, that he was a man I could do business with. I wasn't that naive. It didn't really get me completely, because it's obviously rankled that in that moment he'd been seduced by that whole idea of a very pragmatic man who was actually somebody he could work with in putting the US and Russian relationship on a different footing. So, you know, this has been a pattern that we can go back to the early days of Putin. I mean, he's been with us for a very long time now, 25, 26 years. He's probably chasing Stalin's longevity in office now if he can get towards 30 years, which, you know, at this point looks like he might.

38:26Fiona Hill:But who knows, right? I mean, it's basically it's a pattern that he uses over and over again. It's the seduction. It's the charm. It's the trying to persuade people that you think just like them.

38:37Anita Anand:What is the seduction he's used on Trump? And do you think, are you still in the camp that believes that there is a compromise? Or do you think that Trump has just fallen in love with him?

38:47Fiona Hill:I think Trump's fallen in love with him, with the idea of him, because he's a big, powerful person. He's iconic. He's a badass, you know, in that kind of American sense. He has unbridled power. And it's also that Putin always looks at people's vulnerabilities and what he can use to manipulate them. And it doesn't have to be compromising information. In the case of Trump, there's so much compromise on him. I mean, this is a man who's had how many lawsuits? He's already been forced to make payments to all kinds of people. You know, all of his dirty laundry is out there. If there's any more, it'll just get lost in the wash, so to speak.

39:20Fiona Hill:But what Putin understands about Trump is that Trump responds extremely well to flattery. And we have Mark Rutter of NATO going over the top in terms of his praise for Trump. He is calling him daddy. Putin doesn't go that far. Well, what did you make of that? What did you make of that? Well, I just thought that I cringed like a lot of people did. But it's just exactly what Ruta, like Putin, has ascertained is necessary to do, I mean, to basically kiss Trump's ass, you know, let's put it that way, in the pursuit of your own goals. Now, Putin has other goals and Mark Ruta does, obviously, quite in contradiction to Mark Ruta's goals, which is to keep the United States and Trump firmly in NATO, which Putin doesn't want.

40:09Fiona Hill:He wants the exact opposite. But Putin wants Trump to do all kinds of things for him. He thought he was literally his Trump card for getting Ukraine on a platter. The head of Volodymyr Zelensky, for example, so excited by what happened in the infamous meeting in the White House, for example.

40:24Anita Anand:He must have been thrilled.

40:25Fiona Hill:Oh, he was absolutely thrilled when Trump and J.D. Vance just attacked Zelensky. This was just better than he could possibly have imagined. But what he does is, I mean, yes, he cajoles, he flatters and he persuades Trump. And often Trump doesn't need a lot of persuading because he thinks in some respects in quite similar terms to Putin. And it's about money as well, because, I mean, when you look at what's on offer all the time, both from Trump to the Russians or to everybody else in the Persian Gulf or with Iran or North Korea, it's all about offering people a kind of an amazing future where everybody has a condo.

41:02Fiona Hill:And, of course, somebody in their entourage and family makes money out of it. And Putin does the same. I mean, that's also part of the whole shtick of being a KGB operative when he was in the KGB, which is offering people money, cash, women, you know, you name it.

41:16Anita Anand:I've got a question before we've got to go to Ukraine. But before we get there, one last question. My friend Anne Applebaum has this theory that Lindsey Graham and the religious right have pulled America much closer to Putin because they see it as a Christian country unsullied by liberalism. Do you think that, again, is the result of a Putin love bombing of the Christian right in the US? Is that another Putin play or have they come of their own volition?

41:47Fiona Hill:I think Lindsey Graham should probably be separated out from this because actually in the wake of his recent untimely death, there's actually a move to put more sanctions on Russia in his name through Congress and the Senate at this moment. because Lindsey Graham, for all the other things that he did in support of Trump, was actually pretty stalwart and steadfast in his support for Ukraine throughout the war. And he was a kind of classic Russian hawk in the Republican Party before basically joining forces with Trump for domestic and all kinds of other reasons. But in terms of the religious right, evangelical Christians, all kinds of groups of people, it does actually fall well and truly into this purview.

42:29Fiona Hill:In fact, what's been extraordinarily interesting in a relatively recent period in July of this year of 2026 is that Laura Loomer, one of the influencers in the kind of the MAGA, the Make America Great Again entourage of Trump, took a trip to Kiev and suddenly started to see a kind of a different form of religion here. She visited the Cathedral of the Dormition, which had been badly damaged by a Russian drone attack on Kiev, and suddenly started to say, well, hang on again. Ukraine is actually a Christian country. And in fact, this has been at the core of Putin wanting to retake back Ukraine and Kiev as the very heart of Kievan Russian history, Kievan Rus, as the progenitor of the Russian empire, of the first Christian core of the large imperial Russia.

43:25Fiona Hill:And she starts to say, how can Putin, who I previously thought was basically the savior and the guarantor of all kind of Christianity, just in the mind that you've kind of laid out there, call himself a Christian and a Christian leader when he's presiding over this slaughter of other Christians in Ukraine and also the damaging of this amazing church. So, you know, it's very interesting. It's absolutely using the power of the church, the Russian Orthodox Church domestically, and using it abroad to kind of bring in everyone else as the kind of protector and the guarantor of conservative values.

43:59William Dalrymple:I noticed something, and this is to do with Ukraine and to do with everything that you've just talked about. But the Victory Day marches on the 9th of May, there's a new bumper sticker around Russia, a new slogan, which is we can repeat. And that refers to Stalingrad that, you know what, attrition, we're good at it. We will win. And that it's applied to what's going on with Ukraine. What is going to happen with Ukraine? Now, when we look back on this in 10, 20 years, how is this all going to play out, Fiona?

44:30Fiona Hill:Well, the Ukrainians are good at attrition too. So part of the repurposing of this whole narrative about Stalin and about World War II is you kind of forget that there was not just, you know, kind of Russian Empire in the past that had other parts of it, but also during the Soviet Union, places like Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union. And there's always this attempt to kind of make Khrushchev as a kind of symbol of a Ukrainian, you know, background, the person who gives Crimea to Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera, which, you know, is also more complicated than it looks at the surface. And yes, Khrushchev had worked in Ukraine, had been a minor at, you know, kind of one point, you know, for example, but he wasn't a Ukrainian per se.

45:11Fiona Hill:But there were many Ukrainians who served in the Soviet military and who were there at Stalingrad. And as we know from all the work that Timothy Snyder has done on bloodlands, you know, for example, and Anthony Bevo and his work on World War II and the Soviet Union, some pretty awful things happened in what is now the modern territory of Ukraine. and those were you know very much the scene of you know particularly heated battles and there are all kinds of cities that emerge out of world war ii as hero cities and it's not just stalingrad later volgograd it's crimea it's uh sevastopol on you know the crimean peninsula it's uh cities like kiev it's cities like odessa that are in um ukraine as well because they're also besieged and taken over by Nazi Germany.

46:02Fiona Hill:And the Ukrainians go through not just World War II, but prior to that, they've gone through the Holodomor, the Great Famine that Stalin inflicted on them. So you can see where I'm heading here, that you've already got this kind of whole history of where Ukrainians have suffered as well. So basically, we've got competitive war of attrition going on here, where Ukrainians, despite the fact that they're much smaller in terms of population and size and resources, are managing to bog Russia down because Putin has forgotten that they were part of that same mentality of we're going to survive this as well.

46:38Anita Anand:I've read several Russian experts over the last month who are saying that there is now every reason to think that the boot is on the Ukrainian foot, that the drone attacks on Crimea and so on have given it a whole new edge. Do you think Ukraine could bring Putin down now?

46:54Fiona Hill:Well, I think in combination with lots of other things, it's entirely possible that at least it constrains his options. He gets blocked from going any further. The Ukrainian strategy right now is to take out logistics and supply lines, which we've seen with these long-range strikes into Russian territory on petrochemical plants, for example, and even taking out supermarkets like Wildberries in terms of their big wholesale storages. I mean, it's a bit like the Romans sucking the granaries of every country and place that they came across. So, I mean, again, this is a kind of bit of going back to antiquity.

47:35Fiona Hill:And the Ukrainians have also managed to bog the Russians down on the battlefield. They've used drones rather than robots to really drain the Russians, to bleed them, which is an awful thing to be thinking about. But that's their strategy. Block them, bleed them, take out all of their supply lines. Now, Russia obviously has an enormous amount of resources. One of the parts of the book that Cliff Gaddy and I really focused on, The Survivalist, was about Russia building up the stockpiles, preparing for just this very kind of eventuality. So it's really going to also take a shift in thinking in Russia itself of those people around Putin.

48:15Fiona Hill:And you can see some signs for that. But I think Putin thinks he's still got quite a bit that he can lean into, more that he can draw down on. But look, I think we'll have to see because as we all know, there are always exogenous shocks in the system. I think that the US attack with Israel on Iran is a major exogenous shock that hasn't actually been all that good for Russia, for example, because it puts something else in the calculus that you really can't control. So I would just say we have to watch this space. But, you know, there could well be that just as you get in a war of attrition, both sides exhaust themselves to a point where, you know, there has to be.

48:52Fiona Hill:And that's what a lot of people are hoping for who want to end the war, of course. So there has to be some kind of, it's obviously not going to be a reconciliation, but some kind of compromise reached.

49:02William Dalrymple:Fiona, it is always so fabulous to talk to you. Thank you so much, Fiona Hill there. We've walked a long road, Fiona and Giles and Anthony Beaver. It's been really good having these guides in this series on Stalin. Thank you very much for listening to us. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.

49:23Anita Anand:And goodbye from me, William de Rimpel.