Was Stalin Misunderstood? With Giles Milton

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1:12Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians, to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

1:47Anyways, let's get to it.

1:55my guest today giles milton wrote an incredible book called the stalin affair it takes us behind the scenes of world war ii's improbable alliance uncovering the personalities power struggles and political maneuvers that help shape the outcome of the war we dive into the letters of kathy harriman Churchill's surprising relationship with Stalin and Roosevelt's knack for swaying the American public. Let's get into it.

2:31So joining us now on Open Book is Giles Milton. And this is one of those books where I'm in the bookstore, I find the book, I read the book, I send it to my producer, Giles. And it's a phenomenal book. You're an international bestselling author and historian, historian. And the book's title is called The Stalin Affair, The Impossible Alliance That Won the War. And it is unbelievable what happened because, you know, younger people don't really understand the context, but I'm going to set the scene for them. And I'd like you to talk a little bit about yourself. But for younger people listening in, we had a rise of fascism after a global economic depression.

3:09Lots of that fascism ended up in Asia and some of it ended up in Europe. But the two great fascist leaders, one was a communist leader, one was a national socialist leader. They teamed up and they formed a peace treaty with each other. And that's the most bizarre part about it because Stalin was an antagonist of the West, but now he becomes the part of the alliance that actually helps us win the war. And so in Russia, we both know, you and I, that they call that war the great patriotic war because they see themselves as the real victors in that war. and you wrote this amazing book about so many things that happened that if I didn't read your book, I wouldn't know happened all this improbability.

3:48So let's step back for a moment. Tell us a little bit about yourself, why you decided to write this book, and then we'll talk about the premise of the book. Oh, I mean, ever since I was tiny, I've been completely obsessed by the past. You know, as a little boy, I used to spend my time in antique shops and junk shops. I loved old coins. I loved old books. And I particularly loved old diaries and letters and delving into people's private lives and the story behind the scenes. You know, there's people with metal detectors, they go down beaches and they spend hours looking for coins and stuff. And every now and then they come up with a silver coin or a gold coin.

4:23And I started going into the archives and, you know, you could spend hours in the archives, combing through files and finding nothing. And then one day you come across this fantastic document that sheds light, a whole new light on what you think is a familiar subject. And I suppose that was really the starting point for this book, The Stalin Affair, was that I learned of a collection of letters written by a young, a glamorous young American socialite, Kathy Harriman, 23 years of age, who wrote hundreds of letters to her sister. And those letters revealed an extraordinary story of what happened to her during the Second World War.

4:58Okay. So let's set the scene because Kathy Harriman is the daughter of Avril Harriman. And Avril Harriman is a dilettante. He's a playboy. His father is the founder, descendants of a railroad family. They form an investment bank called Brown Brothers Harriman. But he's an old school wasp in the United States. He's gone to the right boarding schools. And he is somebody that has the respect of Franklin Roosevelt and the white-angle Saxon establishment. He goes to Europe, first to Great Britain. He ends up having an affair with Pamela Digby, also aka Pamela Churchill. She marries Winston Churchill's son.

5:39She becomes Avril Hammerman's last wife at the end of his life, which is a very fascinating book, by the way. We're going to have Sonia Purcell on. I don't know if you know Sonia. She's a good friend of mine, in fact, yes. Okay. So please, hopefully you'll have a good experience on this podcast and you'll let Sonia know, but I read her book with great enthusiasm as well. And now she's a young girl and she's talking about secrets. She's talking about things that if this got disclosed at the time could have been very damaging. So tell her story, tell her relationship with her dad. She also ends up at Yalta.

6:13There's a great book about that, by the way. Another British historian has written a great book about Yalta and these three women, these three young women that are interacting on behalf of their dads at Yalta. But go ahead. Yeah, so Kathy, as I said, she's 23 years old in 1941. She's super bright. She's vivacious. She looks the part, you know, she kind of looks a million dollars. And she's very close to her father. And as you say, President Roosevelt has sent Avril over to really form a very close and special relationship with Winston Churchill. And Avril thinks that if he could have Kathy with him, she'd add a touch of glamour to his life there.

6:50And so he manages to get her over in the form of a journalist, but also she's going to work as his aide. And for the next really sort of year and a half, two years, Cathy and Averill spend their life with Winston Churchill. They are at the very heart of the war. They are there for every big moment. And so, for instance, Cathy is living at the prime minister's country residence of Cheka when the news of Pearl Harbor breaks. And this is one of the letters she writes to her sister where she describes in vivid detail what it's like to be with Winston Churchill when this momentous news comes through.

7:25News, of course, which is going to change the course of the war. And so that what really fascinated me was that, if you like, this is watching the Second World War from behind the curtains. So I felt that because you're dealing with these people in the room with Churchill and, of course, later with Stalin, but both father and daughter are going to be sent to Moscow, that you have a unique perspective on the unfolding events of the war. So, I mean, it's unbelievable, right? I mean, what you know as a historian, what's weird about life is we read it and it's almost like a Hollywood script for us.

8:01So this was the obvious thing that happened. But what you know as a historian, there's so many improbable things that happen to make certain outcomes, right? One is, you know, Lord Halifax has to say that he doesn't want to be prime minister, right? He's the first choice after Neville Chamberlain leaves. Churchill was a controversial figure prior to the war. You know, flamboyant, credible writer, gifted orator. But he's a, you know, he's a drinker. He's got people upset. He likes telling people the truth, right, Giles? He tells people the truth about the Nazis that people don't like. You know that people don't like hearing the truth, right, Giles?

8:37And here's one of the big problems that Churchill is going to find himself in a personal relationship with Joseph Stalin, who is a man he's detested for his entire political career. He called Stalin Soviet regime. He described them as a league of failures, the criminals, the morbid and the deranged. You know, Winston Churchill, when he was Minister of War and Minister of Munitions in 1919, he sent the British Army, British troops into Soviet Russia to try and crush this regime in its very earliest days. So now, bizarrely, Churchill finds himself in a wartime relationship with Joseph Stalin, and he needs someone who's able to manage this relationship because, you know, it's a very, very uncomfortable bedfellows that these two men make.

9:25And of course, they're going to be joined by Roosevelt as well to form the big three relationship that will last throughout the course of the Second World War. So let's go to Mr. Sollen for a second. He's a very complex guy. He's a ruthless murderer. He's a thug. He rises to take power after Lenin. He takes out Trotsky. He eliminates people. He's literally cutting them out of pictures and shooting people. But he's also a little bit nervous guy. He's got a plane. Every time the Germans are heading towards Moscow, he flies himself to his DACA on the Black Sea. When his army is repelling the Germans, he flies back and kills all the people that knew that he flew there.

10:09He's a nervous, paranoid guy, right? Different guy from Churchill. Why don't you set the personalities up for us? Churchill's a little bit more revealing, a little bit more open of a soul, right? Churchill, I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar. He's from an aristocratic background, an old style British aristocrat with a fantastic education, classical background. Stalin could not be more different. Stalin is the son of a wife beating father and drunkard. Stalin very early on was a gangster. He robbed banks down in Georgia where he comes from. But he's also an almost unknown figure, even in the Soviet Union.

10:48You know, he never gives radio addresses. He's never seen in public. So very few people know anything about him. And certainly Churchill and the, you know, ministers in Britain knew nothing about Stalin other than the fact that he is a brutal monster who's liquidated millions of his own subjects. And so, you know, when Churchill decides he's going to go form a political partnership, a wartime partnership with Stalin against Hitler, This is a pretty hard thing to sell, not only to his own ministers, but to the British public. And so what Churchill does on the day, the very day that Hitler invades the Soviet Union, Churchill makes this, I think, politically brave broadcast to the British nation, explaining that, you know, no one has been a more steadfast opponent of Stalin and the Soviets for his entire political career.

11:36But, you know, when it comes down to political monsters, Hitler is worse than Stalin. and therefore we're going to side with Stalin against Hitler. So he gives this groundbreaking broadcast. And this is the beginnings of this famous wartime relationship, which will just about last the course of the war. But there are going to be many, many mountains to climb. There's going to be many disasters. Many things are going to go wrong. And the relationship is going to break up almost on a number of occasions. And it's going to be saved by the trio of individuals who sort of form the heart of the narrative in my book.

12:13Well, I will say this about your writing. Your writing is very crisp. It's very eloquent in terms of describing the personalities. But for an American, your voice is even better because I listened to you on the Audible version of the book and I found your voice to be very compelling. And so this is my little broadcast to my viewers and listeners and followers that this book is great both in its written form, but it's also great in audio, where I have a tendency sometimes due to my travel schedule to go back and forth between. But there are two guys here that are instrumental in this story, in addition to Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt.

12:52One is Avril Harriman, and one is Archibald Clark Kerr. So tell us about those men. And in particular, there's some intrigue around Archibald that I'd like you to share with us? Archibald Clark was a true eccentric British maverick. You've got to really picture diplomats of the period in Great Britain. We're talking about men who wore pinstripe suits, they wore bowler hats, they carried rolled umbrellas, black briefcases, and they went to Eton and Oxford, the best schools and universities in the country, and they were always referred to as Your Excellency. Well, Archie would have none of this.

13:29He insisted on everyone should call him Archie. He held his meetings in the embassy in Moscow, where he was ambassador. In summer months, he held it in his deck chair, in shorts, bare-chested. He wrote all his memos to the Foreign Office in London with a quill pen. And this necessitated him having a flock of geese in the British Embassy. And every time he needed a quill, a new quill, he'd pluck a feather from this protesting goose, sharpen it off, and write these fabulously colourful memos to his colleagues in the Foreign Office. But the importance of Archie was, A, he was a very old friend of Winston Churchill, who particularly admired his personal skills.

14:10And these came to the fore when Archie was sent to Moscow, finds himself in the Kremlin in a private meeting with Joseph Stalin. And bizarrely, these two men hit it off from the minute they first meet. They both are avaricious pipe smokers, and they bond over tobacco. And from that moment on, Archie Clark becomes a close confidant of Joseph Stalin. And this is going to be an incredibly important partnership because Archie is the only person that can keep this allied relationship between Churchill and Stalin, always a rocky one, keep it on track. It's fascinating, right? If he doesn't exist, who knows what could have happened in that relationship?

14:51Because remember, Stalin is calling for more troops. He wants more troops on the Western front, right? And the Americans are not ready. The Brits are not ready. Roosevelt's not ready. And he keeps them going. He keeps this relationship going. What about Molotov? Talk about him for a second. He's another intriguing character in your narrative. Yeah, Molotov is really the only person - But also set the scene, Giles, if you don't mind. Molotov is the foreign minister. I'm sorry, I should have said that. We've got young people. You know, what I love about my podcast, because I actually know my demo.

15:27We've got a lot of young people. They listen because they're like, all right, at least the mooch is going to give me some shit about history, right? That's great. We need young people. We need young people, Giles. You and I need young people. So set the scene on Molotov. Tell me who Molotov is first. So Stalin had a very small circle of advisors, this inner circle of which the most important with Molotov, his foreign commissar. He's like a foreign minister, essentially. And so he's dealing with the outside world. He's the one that's dealing with Winston Churchill, with Roosevelt. He's a sort of the public face, if you like, of the Soviet system.

16:00But frankly, the Soviet system is so Stalin-centric that everything revolves around Joseph Stalin. And everyone realizes this, and particularly Winston Churchill realizes that nothing will ever get done unless Joseph Stalin has agreed to it. And so you get this very momentous event in the summer of 1942, where Winston Churchill takes the decision to fly to Moscow to go and meet Stalin himself, his arch enemy. He's going to see him and try and forge a personal relationship with him. And it's worth sort of picturing the scenes of that first meeting. You have a British aristocrat who's detested Stalin, the gangster, all his political life, flying into the Kremlin to meet him.

16:44And they meet. And that first meeting is an unmitigated disaster. Stalin throws insults at Winston Churchill. He personally abuses him. And the whole thing ends in absolute disaster. Churchill storms out of the Kremlin and he says, I'm having nothing more to do with this man. I'm tearing up the allied relationship. I'm pulling out of this partnership. Stalin could go it alone. the Soviet Union can go it alone. This is the point where Archie Clark Kerr steps into the fore because he realises Churchill's making a catastrophic mistake. And the rather brilliant thing about Archie is that he knows Churchill's strengths, but he also knows his weaknesses.

17:26And he takes him to one side. And everyone else has tried to persuade Churchill to stay in Moscow. Churchill refuses. But Archie takes him to one side and explains that, you know, Stalin is just a good-for-nothing gangster. He speaks in insulting language. Churchill has to go beyond this. He tells Churchill to go back into the Kremlin for one more time to try and forge a relationship with Joseph Stalin. And Churchill finally agrees to this, goes back into the Kremlin, gets completely drunk with Joseph Stalin. They bond over bottles of whiskey and vodka and God knows what. And Churchill comes back that night to the Dacha where he's staying and says to Archie that he's become great friends with Joseph Stalin.

18:11And this vital wartime partnership, this is the thing that's going to win the Second World War for the Allies. This partnership, this partnership in that night is back on track. And so Archie has really, you know, saved the vital Allied relationship at that point in the war. Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today.

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19:25Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. On that evening. Yeah, no, listen, there's no question. I mean, we don't win that war without the Russians. The Germans are well, way more prepared in terms of their military arsenal and their troops and their training than we are. We're frankly caught off guard. We have a couple of miracles happen. We have the miracle at Dunkirk. We have the miracle of Franklin Roosevelt putting down, frankly, the first America First movement, which was a Nazi movement in the United States. There's a couple of big miracles that happened. Some would think, certainly Churchill thought, that the Pearl Harbor sneak attack was a miracle because it brought Roosevelt into the war.

20:07He was trying to coax him into the war. And the interesting thing about it is Germany declares war on the United States before we even decide to declare war on Germany. So we have all this interesting, improbable things are happening. What makes your book so interesting is the realness of it. You can hear the conversations. You can hear the aftermath of decision-making, both failed decision-making and successful decision-making. But I want to go to Kathy Harriman before I flip over to something else. She has a charm about her. She seems to have played an important role in navigating these relationships.

20:44Tell us who she is as a person and tell us the value that she provides being part of the story. So Cathy is initially brought over to London by her father to work as a journalist because he thinks she'll be able to get across to the American public the hardships that the British are facing, the appalling bombardments of the blitz that are taking place. You know, Churchill is desperate for American aid, not just munitions, weaponry, but food, supplies, everything. And so that's her first role. But also, she's very good at managing the Churchill family, at working alongside Winston Churchill, at getting him on side.

21:23And as you said earlier, you know, within 10 days of her father arriving in England, he's in bed with Pamela Churchill, you know, which is taking the special relationship to pretty new extremes. But Cathy, then Avril, her father, wants her to come with him to Moscow, because I think he's hoping not only could she work as his aide, but some of her charm will work wonders on Stalin and his commissars. And, you know, she's not just a sort of attractive woman adorning the American embassy in Moscow. She's got a real role to play. She learns Russian very quickly and speaks it very well. She works for the Office of War Information in Moscow.

22:02She hosts the American embassy parties, which were never innocent events. These were parties at which she attempts to get Stalin's commissars as drunk as possible and try and get information out of them. because what her and her father want to know is what is Stalin's plans for the post-war world, particularly as the war goes on and moves into its final year. It's clear that the Allies are going to win. They want to know what Stalin is planning to do at the end of the Second World War. And so she plays an incredibly important role in information gathering, but also supporting her father in this incredibly important work.

22:39It's amazing. It's an amazing story. She's a 23-year-old young woman. She's educated, but she's just 23, and she's in there. It's amazing. She's making toasts to Joseph Stalin at these formal dinners that they have all the time, in Russian as well. She goes to the Bolshoi Ballet with Stalin. She has dinners with him all the time. Yeah, she's watching her vodka glass, and he's not intimidated by her at all. He's trying to charm her. It's classic stuff where we read about these people, and we two-dimensionalize them as great protagonists and antagonists in a novel, but they're actually human beings.

23:15And she provides this softening agent for the relationship. He likes her. Yeah. And I think what's so appealing about Cathy's letters and why I found them so wonderful is they're so vivid. You've got a very different, a very personal side to the Second World War. We're all used to the familiar stories of the big battles and everything, but to get the picture of what it's like in Churchill's living room. I mentioned Pearl Harbour. She describes a scene of Churchill's been hung over all day because they drank too much on the previous night. He's been sitting there with his head in his hands. They turn on the nine o 'clock news on the BBC and they miss the headlines.

23:52So they miss the big story. The news goes on, it comes back to the headlines. And then they're only half listening. And she describes how Churchill says, what was this about? Was it Pearl Harbour? Was it Pearl River? What are they talking about? And he finally realizes that the Americans have been attacked at Pearl Harbor. And having sat all day with his head in his hands, he leaps up from his armchairs and shouts out, we shall declare war on Japan. This great moment for Winston Churchill, America's now in the war. And to have this vivid portrayal of it is something you very rarely read, I think, in history books.

24:26Yeah, I love that. I mean, you put it together, Giles. I mean, it's an awesome book. I want to go to the Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin dynamic. And I want to also relate to our listeners that Roosevelt is in his third presidential term, and he's not well. He has high blood pressure. He's been afflicted, obviously, with either polio or Guillain-Barre syndrome, where he's significantly paralyzed, and it's affecting his physicality. And he's not well, but he's also a big thinker. He's trying to set up the United Nations. He sees himself as this grand figure, and he dishes his good friend Winston Churchill a little bit to endear himself to, quote unquote, Uncle Joe.