Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Beria: Stalin's Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer
Episode Date: April 18, 2024Beria? I hardly know'ya. Anyway, this is the last episode of the series. Goodbye.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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ah boy howdy you know what I love more than anything
is a nice good piece of new Hitler news.
You know, for whatever reason,
we don't get a lot of that anymore.
Baffling as to why, but I just came across,
the story's not new, but it's hit social media.
The way these things apparently sometimes do
when people realize there's engagement to be gotten.
And the title of this New York Post article, Joe Kasabian, our guest, host of The Lion,
Led by Doggies podcast, co-host, and Sophie, my producer, the headline of this article
is Adolf Hitler's last living relative convicted of pedophilia.
Now, and we get a picture of like a man who looks to be in his 60s with like a bald head that's entirely a tattoo
All right, all right very yellow teeth and and look folks
No one would love it more than me if there was there was some new Hitler gossip that made the family look bad
There's no fresh hitler is article some fresh hitler isms
The first the first line of the article is,
a man claiming to be Adolf Hitler's last living relative
has been convicted of pedophilia.
And this guy is a creep,
and his last name is apparently Hitler.
But there's other Hitlers.
He has other living relatives, right?
Like this guy, even if this guy is related to Hitler,
which I have not done the work to confirm
He's not the last Hitler. I mean, I wish he was you know when you're convicted when you when you're a convicted or charged of pedophilia
You got to take some the heat off like man anybody anybody googles my name. There's a thing with pedophilia pedophilia pedophilia
How can I possibly beat that as a headline? I know I'm a Hitler. He is the one guy who could mitigate
Being convicted of petaphilia with like okay. This is bad, but compared to my uncle Hitler
It always reminds you that you know
Willie Hitler yeah, there's nephew
retired to upstate New York after serving in the US Navy in World War two and then died and kept you kept to see he
Changed his last name to I think a
Stuart Huston or something like that. You would want to you know if you're not a Hitler. Yeah and
one of his neighbors said you know like because all of it once it came out who he was like the
local news is interviewing all of his neighbors and one of my favorite lines I think I've ever
read in any local news piece is his neighbors like you know what now that you mentioned it he did
kind of look like Hitler. He did kind of have a Hitler vibe do it
Lurie there's another story that's a bit more accurate than this which is that all of Hitler's last living relatives agreed
Independently not to have kids not entirely true
There are a number of Hitler relatives who were like probably shouldn't make any more of this
Probably had enough of the hitlers all the hitlers gathering around the
Circle putting their hands in and say back shots on three
It is you know, I do actually kind of feel like maybe it's worse to be like as a Hitler
I'm not gonna have any kids cuz you're kind of leaning into his weird attitudes about genetics cuz yeah
There wasn't Hitler wasn't Hitler because of his his genes
He was Hitler because of his Hitler and that reminds me of so I can actually talk about this now because I they never
Made me sign an NDA, but the History Channel
Interviewed me to possibly host a show about Hitler a couple months ago.
Oh, man.
I wanted the job so goddamn much.
Yeah.
And for some reason, it involved me rappelling down rock walls and stuff.
I'm not entirely sure why, but the whole thing was.
Could you really report on Hitler?
Specifically, Hitler's DNA?
Like, I didn't give a single flying fuck because the topic is so stupid.
But I'm like, you're telling me I get to be on the history channel
rappel down rock walls and then spout dumb shit about Hitler's DNA
Sign me this like if you told eight-year-old me to get to do this. I you'd be fucking ecstatic
Yeah, wow that was a long descent speaking of long descents. Let's talk about the last ten years of Hitler's life
Speaking of long-descent, let's talk about the last 10 years of Hitler's life
Yeah, there's good ways you could do that, you know Joe
Everybody loves talking Hitler not everybody loves talking Hitler But enough people do that
It's a pretty reliable source of content for a number of people in the show for people who do a job like me and you
It was never ending font of content.
Yeah, he really has done the podcasters
and history channel documentary producers
of The World is Solid.
Speaking of things people love to talk about,
World War II.
Now, I don't think it's controversial to say,
most people who have a favorite war,
that war is World War II, right? And people love talking World War II for the same reason that Warhammer
40,000 is now the most profitable export in British history
It's got a little bit of everything right and if the experience you're looking for in a war is an almost Michael Scott
Like story of executive incompetence leading to disaster and unbelievable awkwardness. Well, the big dub dub dose has that one in spades, brother.
And this brings me back to the story
of Joseph Stalin and his buddies,
which now includes Lavrenty Beria as an integral member.
And at this point, pretty experienced ethnic cleanser,
right?
He's good at deportations.
He's done a lot of that.
He's still on practice.
Right? Yeah, he's up there, right? He's good at deportations. He's done a lot of that. He's still on practice. Right?
Yeah, he's up there, right?
Top 10% of deporters in the world at this moment, right?
Almost unquestionably.
And, you know, 1940, 1941, prior to Operation Barbarossa,
everybody in Stalin's inner circle, almost everybody,
we'll talk about Molotov in a second,
but most of the people in Stalin's inner circle, including everybody. We'll talk about Molotov in a second, but most of the people in Stalin's inner circle,
including Stalin, know some kind of conflict
is coming with the Nazis, right?
Stalin though, and again, when people say that,
and that's accurate, they often mean that to be like,
everyone knew that a war like World War II was for Russia
was coming, and they did not, right?
Stalin would not have made a lot of the choices he made
if he felt like the World War II that Russia got was right in the offing, right?
Yeah, he'd probably be a little bit less purgy.
A little less purgy, a little more have some kind of effective defenses set up for the Wehrmacht,
you know? E, a little less keep his entire Air Force grounded so it gets blown up on the tarmacs.
E, you know, a couple of things he might have done. keep his entire air force grounded so it gets blown up on the tarmacs, E?
Couple of things he might've done.
Kills so many pilots,
they can't even fucking fly effectively.
Some changes would've been made, right?
And when I say that Stalin doesn't know
the war that's coming is coming,
it's part of what I'm saying is because Stalin
is certain a conflict's coming,
but he thinks they've got years before anything happens.
He thinks they've got,
we've got enough time to rebuild the Red Army from the purges.
And not just to do that, but when the USSR moves west to take Eastern Poland, to take
all these Baltic states, Stalin has his troops disassemble the fortifications on their Western
border because he wants to move those up.
He doesn't want there to not be fortifications, but he's like, well, we'll take these apart
and we'll rebuild a defensive line closer to the new border, right, with the West, which
has moved forward a lot.
But there's like an awkward period in between taking apart the fortifications that had existed
and getting the new ones up.
And they're not going to have that new set of fortifications
up by July of 1941, when the Nazis unleash Operation Barbarossa,
which is still the largest military operation
in the history of mankind.
Hopefully always will be.
I wanna see it get beat.
Always gonna put an asterisk next to that.
Yeah, so far.
Always gonna put an asterisk next to a statement like that.
Yeah.
You don't wanna tempt anybody to beating the Guinness Book of World Records like the executioner to close it off
God, I would love to see the Guinness Book of World Records entry for that though. She's based on the executioner one
Yeah, well Stalin is convinced that there's going to be a fight and Hitler's obviously got one planned
There's this awkward interstitial period in late 1940 where
Molotov as the USSR's foreign policy guy and is the dumbest guy who's close to
Stalin I don't know if that's generally agreed by historians my read having
read a couple books about these guys Molotov was kind of the dipshit of the
crew right doesn't seem like the sharpest sickle of the hammer,
you know?
He's not the best of them, right?
And Molotov is kind of notably the guy who is most convinced
that like we actually might be able to ally with the Nazis
to fight the British, you know?
He has kind of a fantasy that this might be possible.
And he has this fantasy because Joachim von Ribbentrop,
who's his opposite, let me get it again, it's the Molotovim von Ribbentrop, who's his opposite,
I mean, again, it's the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, right?
People are aware of this.
Yeah.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, his opposite number in Germany,
has kind of like,
incepted this idea that like,
oh, you know what?
I know our bosses don't get along,
but like, I feel like Hitler might let the USSR
in the tripartite pact.
You could be member number four. You could be on a team with heavy hitters like Italy. Come on, Italy, you know,
notable middle military mass rent Benito Mussolini.
You know who always pulls their weight in 20th century war? The Italians.
Guys, don't worry, they can't possibly switch sides on us again.
Don't worry, they can't possibly switch sides on us again. It is very funny.
Italy is like the case study of a country, this amazing period of like utter military
dominance and then just never gets their shit together again for a thousand years.
I'm being a little unfair to a couple of the city states, but it's for the purposes of
comedy.
I don't think, and I don't think anyone really thinks,
there was ever a serious possibility of like the USSR
and the Nazis allying against the British
in a realistic way, right?
But Molotov thinks it might be possible for a while.
Now again, he's not fully convinced of this.
And Ribbentrop, it's kind of a back and forth
with trying to like keep Molotov on board with the idea. And Ribbentrop, who's kind of a back and forth with trying to like keep Molotov on board with the idea.
And Ribbentrop, who's also a little bit of a dipshit,
nearly has a panic attack because like Molotov
is in Berlin, they're talking all this through,
and the British launch an air raid.
And you know, Ribbentrop is like, don't worry, Molotov,
the Brits are already beat.
And in a rare moment of lucidity, Molotovov asks well, then who is dropping the bombs on us?
You've got the British on the ropes who is bombing your capital which to be fair to Molotov
That's not a bad question in the moment to ask
That'll buff out. It's a
Berlin
The last gasp of a dying Empire carpet bombing the capital it's
In war
Right your capital is gonna get a little completely destroyed in a way that very few cities in history have ever been destroyed
But hey come the 60s, it's gonna be great. It's great for real estate prices asp
Yeah, yeah Rotterdam's gonna eventually be doing very well
So this does not deal directly with barrier
But I found a passage in Sheila Fitzpatrick's book on Stalin's team that I enjoyed too much not to share
Molotov had a meeting with Hitler too and observed with interest that he was trying to do propaganda on him
Evidently, he was very one-sided an nationalist, a chauvinist who was blinded
by his ideas.
Which is not a bad description of Hitler, I just find the Hitler's doing propaganda
on me.
Imagine that!
From Hitler!
You think this guy should have propagandaed me?
I don't know, he seems like such an honest customer every other time.
Propaganda from a Hitler? No.
So Beria's actual role in this period, pretty obvious.
As the USSR's spymaster,
he is responsible for ferrying reams of information
to Stalin that make it very clear
the Germans are about to invade.
There's a lot of data on this, right?
They had no good rea...
And Beria, I mean mean not to his credit because of
What he's about to do is not handle this the best way he can but barrier is has plenty of info to be like
Well, yeah, obviously they're about to fucking invade right like they have three million men masked on the border
This is not the hardest thing to figure out
Just camping you know how the Germans love fresh air. Yeah, we love tents, we love the ground.
It's very nice.
My German accent, terrible.
Anyway, so this is a dangerous position to be in
because Stalin has already made up his mind
that the Germans are not going to invade, right?
Yet, you know?
So Barry, you can't just go to Stalin and be like,
you're wrong, they're obviously about to invade
because telling Stalin he's wrong
is a great way to wind up not alive anymore.
So Barry has got to thread the needle of,
he has to warn Stalin because when they do invade,
you don't want Stalin to be like,
where was the fucking evidence of this?
Why didn't you tell me they're invading?
You also have to set it up in a way
that you're not saying I told you so,
because he'll just kill you.
This is a tough, to be fair to Beria. That's a hard position to be it, you know There's no short guys in that position to be the one that finally gets to kill Beria like yeah, please let him fuck up
Yeah, they've got like a tontine going now in a memo written just days before the invasion
Now in a memo written just days before the invasion, Beria laid out a huge number of warning signs that one was imminent before concluding with forced cheer that since Stalin
had figured out nothing was going to happen, it was all probably fine.
It is kind of a master class in ass covering.
But part of protecting his own ass was that Beria had to attack the military officers
who were trying to warn Stalin and the intelligence officers who were trying to provide warnings, right?
In his book, Sangster writes, quote, Beria also knew the facts and was worried about
an attack in the caucuses oil fields.
It amounted to a curious problem because such was the fear of Stalin that no one wanted
to disagree with him or even suggest he was wrong or upset him.
Beria went so far as to accuse the head of military intelligence of being a liar, even
though his own information backed those observations.
Now, I think the funniest, maybe saddest example of how deranged things get is that like, obviously
Germany had had a lot of communists before the Nazis when a lot of those communists just
kind of sink back into the woodwork, the ones who are not prominent enough that they're
going to get purged or at least not going to spend too long in a camp, right?
A lot of guys get put in a, you know, what are called wild concentration camps for a
while and they have a bad time, but they eventually get out.
And a decent number of these guys get drafted into the Wehrmacht later, right?
And some of these, a significant number, I think of these guys in the lead up to Operation
Barbarossa are like, well, I don't want to invade Russia. I am still a
communist. And they sneak across the border to try and warn the Russians, right? Try to warn
comrade Stalin like, Hey guys, the fascists are coming, right? I'm assuming they are all
assumed to be spies. I'm assuming these warnings are taken immediately seriously and nothing bad
happens to these loyal German communists. No, they are treated as spies. That's what you get for trying to stop Operation Barbarossa.
Damn.
On June 22nd, 1941, some 3 million Germans,
complete with a lot of tanks and trucks,
but even more horses, cross the Soviet border
and start committing war crimes
like there was a shortage at the war crime store,
which is just a TJ Maxx.
In the first few days,
the Wehrmacht encountered minimal resistance
and Soviet losses were nightmarishly,
like high enough, basically pretty much any other country
in the history of the world would have collapsed
from the kind of casualties the Soviets are taking
in these early days of Barbarossa, right?
Like they are losing the entire modern day
active duty strength of the US Army
and some of these engagements
in terms of like captured, right, primarily.
The only time you ever read about casualty numbers
quite like this is reading about like, I don't know,
any war involving China.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, like the war over the heavenly kingdom,
the Hong Kong or Taipei rebellion,
which is like 100 years before this point.
Taipei heavenly kingdom,
which we also did a series about.
Right.
Thanks for that layup, Robert.
Yeah, these are unthinkable.
Like again, the entire US would collapse
if we had losses like this.
It's impossible to really comprehend.
What casualties did we suffer today?
Oh, the entire population of Cleveland.
Yeah, yeah, we lost a Portland out there.
Sorry, guys. Most of San Francisco
just got captured. So, Beria had given out orders, you know, kind of because again, the
very much not just the not the Wehrmacht, but the Luftwaffe is doing like some cross
border air reconnaissance and stuff in the days leading up to this, right?
And on the day of the attack, right?
Obviously planes are heading in a lot of areas ahead of the ground troops.
They're doing attacks, they're bombing airfields.
And because it's unclear initially, is this an invasion?
Is there some sort of fuck up?
I mean, it's pretty clear to people who are not blinkered by, you know, not wanting to
anger Stalin what's happening.
But Beria acting on Stalin's orders, orders that Soviet troops not fire on these
planes that have crossed in the Soviet airspace because like Stalin doesn't
want to provoke a fight, right? Little late on the draw there, J. Stahl.
Maybe they're just lost. Yeah, maybe they're just lost and bombing our airfields
mistakenly. Maybe they think they're their own airfields and they just need to get rid of some planes. It happens
After his fall in execution Beria was denounced as a traitor in Soviet history books for this
But this is not really fair. This is the only time I'll say this
That's not really fair to Beria as Sangster points out
Beria had in fact warned Stalin on June 12th writing that in a few instances
they, the German aircraft, had penetrated 60 miles or more in the direction of military installations and large troop concentrations.
Stalin appeared paralyzed and decided not to blink in case it provoked the Germans.
Really bad call. I think we can all agree here.
Don't look I understand that they're bombing us.
I don't agree here. Don't worry.
Look, I understand that they're bombing us.
Maybe it's some misunderstanding that only exists
in the warped brain of Pre-Stroke Stalin.
Yeah, yeah.
Hope maybe Pre-Stroke Stalin.
We don't know when that first one hit, right?
He may have been throwing a blood clot at this point.
Yeah, he may have been popping a couple of clots.
You know what they say about J-Stall? Really cloddy. Really cloddy fella. Yeah, he may have been popping a couple of clots. You know what they say about J. Stahl?
Really cloddy.
Really cloddy fella.
Now, depending on who you ask, after the invasion,
like in the immediate aftermath of the invasion,
Stalin either has this panic attack or just a mental collapse
or he executes a complex face saving plan
based on Russian history.
And the truth is probably kind of all of the above, right?
We do know that he is panicked and not hard to see why.
If three million Germans invaded me, I would probably be a little worried, right?
Normally you have to pay for that kind of treatment.
No, I had three invade me at a hostel once and it was a real problem until I found out
they had Mali.
Then things got a lot better.
But it was rough for a little while, let me tell you.
Now we know Stalin was furious for once in himself, right?
He has this line where he's like,
we including himself in this,
like foolishly squandered Lennon's great inheritance, right?
There's like this moment where he's like,
he can't deny like, oh, this is a real,
this is a real fuck up on my part.
This could have got a lot better. Guys, I kind of dropped the ball on this one. You know what? I fucked up on my part. This could have gone a lot better.
Guys, I kinda dropped the ball on this one.
You know what?
I fucked up a bit here.
And he immediately flees the Kremlin for his country house
where he locks himself away for the rest of the government
for I think like a week.
And you have to presume he gets the kind of drunk
that no one else has ever gotten, right?
This is probably a unique level of fucked up.
Like I just walked into a German invasion. Yeah. Right. This is probably a unique level of fucked up like this is a trend
German invasion. Yeah
It's it's a you know, the doctor Manhattan floating on the moon surface level of enlightened drunk
Now the people who will say like he was also kind of doing he was he was he was in his reaction to the invasion
directly sort of signposting some stuff from Russian history will point out that like Ivan the Terrible, who was the ruler
of Russia from like 1547 to 1584, had fucked up in a pretty huge and obvious public way
himself.
And when he did in the wake of it, he like fled to hide alone so that his nobles could
come and find him and beg him to come back, right?
And this is sort of like,
he felt like there was this need for him to be like,
I made a mistake and then to say,
we still want you to run things, right?
I don't- Sure.
I'm not enough of an expert on like why that was necessary,
but people will argue that by sort of fleeing
to his dacha like this, Stalin was doing the same thing.
And I don't see why that wouldn't be part
of his calculus, right?
It makes more sense than a man like Stalin
to have like a complete emotional breakdown.
Sure.
He's not really a man that felt emotions.
Right.
And I don't see why it can't be both.
Why he can't be like, I'm really fucked up
and maybe this is the end for me,
but also maybe my best chance is to like do this thing
that there's already kind of like a precedent for
in history, right?
A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.
A lot from a bottle of vodka.
A lot from vodka.
Now, you know, in Ivan the Terrible's case,
the nobles are I'm guessing they were his boyers,
I think that's the term, you know, for it.
In Stalin's case, the nobles that have to come and ask him to retake the reins of power
are his circle of buddies.
This is going to include our boy Beria.
They all show up at the Dacia.
Beria, before they show up at the Dacia to go pick Stalin up off of his sick puddle on
the floor, Beria is like, we should form a new organization, the state defense committee
to organize the war effort.
And what'll really make Stalin, what'll really pick him up, like perk him up, is if we make
him the head of this thing before we come and get him, right?
Come on buddy, you can be in charge.
Come on buddy.
One thing you got to give him, you know, not every bastard is the best at something I've
ever heard of.
He might be the best ass kisser I've ever heard of.
He really has that down.
He's tongue deep in that motherfucker.
Yeah, you're right, you're right.
He is past the colon.
He's like Gene Simmons up in there.
He is feasting like he's at a golden corral of ass.
Yeah, which is just a golden corral.
So Barry and everybody else,
they all traveled to Stalin's dacha to assure him,
hey buddy, we still love you, right?
We still want you to be our czar effectively, right?
And Barry is like, and look man,
we made this whole new committee, you're in charge of it.
Don't you wanna come back?
And maybe we all do a World War II together.
And Stalin, he kind of like looks down at the floor
and then he looks up at his buds and like the music,
the heartwarming music starts to play and he's like,
yeah, let's do a World War II.
And then everybody hugs, you know?
I assume.
It was three days from retirement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do kind of want a World War II,
Stalin's Inner Circle movie,
but starring the main two characters
from the Lethal Weapon franchise.
Oh God.
Yeah.
I mean, to be fair,
Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic enough to play Joseph Stalin.
Honestly, he could be either of them, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the reality is that everybody gets back to work, you know, in relatively short order,
but not in a way that is initially effective or efficient.
Again, these guys have a lot of skills, right?
They're not bad at everything that they do.
Beria is, the stuff we've talked about him doing in terms of organizing these deportations
and mass executions, they're bad things to do, but he does them competently.
None of them really know how to wage the largest war
in the history of human experience, right?
Which to be fair is quite a task.
Yeah, you gotta pick up the ropes as you go along, right?
We can't all be George S. Patton,
the reincarnation of Hannibal.
Oh, what a beautiful maniac.
We'll talk about him one of these days.
He's got an episode or two coming up.
What a bastard he was.
Real bastard.
Right about the M1 Garand,
but wrong about everything else.
True.
So Stalin's first instinct,
because things are going very badly for the USSR,
is to try and sue for peace.
He has a lot of territory,
and he's like, if Hitler just wants land,
I'll give him some fucking land.
Can we work this out, right?
I've got a lot of Russia, I can afford the burn, you know?
You want some Baltics?
Take them.
You want the Baltics?
You want some Ukraine?
Take it.
I didn't even want it.
Zhukov visits shortly after the invasion,
being one of the few guys who's in the military
and competent that's left alive.
And he meets with Beria and Stalin.
And it's again, you know, any report you have
from inside the inner circle in this period is imperfect.
I trust Zhukov more than most of these guys.
Not that he doesn't have some face saving to do,
but I trust him more than most of them.
And he claims that when he meets with these guys,
they are both like in panic mode
and convinced that victory is impossible, right?
The doom saying Beria and Stalin are both so like blackpilled
on their chances that at one point,
Zhukov has to ask comrade Stalin,
do I have permission to do my job, right?
You are clearly panicking too much
to handle anything right now.
Can I go do a war, right?
Silence descends upon the room after this.
And just a few months later,
this would have ended with Zhukov shot in a ditch, right?
But Beria, all that happens in this case is Beria
just kind of gives this limp warning that like,
well, the opinion of the party is important,
the party being Stalin.
And Zhukov's like, I don't give a fuck about that right now,
man, like, do you wanna win this fucker or not? You know, they were they're fine
There's not gonna be a party in a fucking three weeks. Yeah
So obviously this is not a military history podcast
There's plenty of places where you can go to read about how the situation in the East gets turned around
Well, it's not the East to Stalin
It's largely the West but you get you know what I'm saying
turned around, well, it's not the East to Stalin, it's largely the West, but you get, you know what I'm saying.
While millions upon millions of people are dying fighting the Nazis, life gets a lot
better for Beria.
World War II is really good for him because of all of the people close to Stalin, he's
one of the guys who's kind of most useful in this situation, right?
Because he's a logistics guy, you know?
And prior to the outbreak of war war the security agencies had already been fairly
Centralized and once the war really kicks everything gets centralized within the NKVD
Which makes him unequivocally the most powerful security chief in the history of like almost any country
There's not a whole lot of competition
Elements during like World War two where the NKVD has its own military formations and yes, very apatly
Refuses to allow the Red Army to command them and he has the power to do so
He sure does and he's not gonna be great at that part
No, he is good at he is kind of one of the guys who's in charge of this very famous effort to basically
Disassemble all of these Soviet heavy factories that are producing war material and move them east, right?
So that they can get reset up.
Because he's so good at logistics, he's one of the guys who's organizing this in a big
way, right?
And he's, from at least what I've read, seems to have been competent in this kind of stuff.
He does a lot of, in addition to running security, a lot of... Because a lot of what the NKVD
armed units are doing is ensuring that like supplies get places, right?
Because obviously you need soldiers doing that
to some extent.
And I don't think he's incompetent at this.
Now, in addition to all of the practical shit
that he's doing, Beria finds time to get up
to some hideously evil bullshit as well.
The Volga region.
Of course he does.
This is our boy Beria we're talking about here.
You know? He's not gonna shelve his hobbies during a whole war
He's surrounded by death. This is what he was built for
Yeah, yeah, this is what he was built for just like our audience was built to be advertised to so
Take out your credit card
Marry it to me. I'll buy some stuff for you or for me, you know, for somebody.
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free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe, and I'm back for another season of my podcast, Climbing in Heels. You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project, or perhaps from my work as a
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things fashion, beauty and business. My podcast, Climbing in Heels,
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you a weekly dose of glamour, inspiration, and fun. Every week, listeners will be able to ask
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Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa? But how much do
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We're back!
And my Baryacoin is now worth, I don't know, seven Nagant revolvers or almost $35. So that's pretty great.
I feel like the instructions are unclear in Barriercoin. For people who don't know, you
can actually use three slurp juices on your Barriercoin.
Yeah. And that's how you get a Mellenkov? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe.
I'm not sure how this would work.
I'm not really sure how we want to how we want to play this. Now, in addition to all of the practical shit this day,
again, so the Volga region includes a semi-autonomous
kind of German Republic.
It's called semi-autonomous, right?
This is a part of the USSR,
but it's not a part of the USSR
that Stalin trust prior to the war.
And because these people are like ethnically German,
this isn't gonna be,
that's not a good time to be an ethnic German in the Soviet Union, right?
Probably don't need to explain why.
Beria has NKVD men dress up as German paratroopers and land in towns in this area to test the
loyalty of German ethnicity citizens.
Their reaction, which I think is like the normal reaction of civilians to soldiers swarming your area, which is like, please don't kill me
I'll do whatever right? It's the way most people act in this situation. Yeah
Yeah, their reaction was used as a pretext to abolish this quote-unquote autonomous Republic and
Forcibly ship hundreds of thousands of Volga Germans East mostly to Siberia or Kazakhstan
This is gonna prove to be, again, there's
this other frenzy of deportations that hadn't really ended from like the wave we talked
about last episode, but millions more people are deported because they're considered traitors
by dent of their ancestry. And of course, these brutal actions force these people, thousands
and thousands of folks die, right? Amy Knight writes this about that period of deportations.
Barry's matter of fact reports, of course, reveal nothing of the human suffering that
was wrought by this mini Holocaust.
Tens of thousands, including women, children, and old people, perished while they were being
transported like cattle in overcrowded railway cars without water or food.
In the process of shipping the Chechens and Ingush, the NKVD had decided that it can make
do with fewer railway cars by crowding 45 instead of 40 persons into each carriage,
a perfectly reasonable decision, he observed, since almost half the contingent were children.
He added that they had also been compelled to do without sanitation facilities, and consequently
an epidemic of typhus had broken out.
One of those who survived the trip later described it.
"'In cattle cars filled to overflowing without lighter water, we traveled for almost a month
to our destination.
Typhus was having a hay day.
There was no medicine.
During the short stops at lonely, uninhabited stations, we buried our dead near the train
and snow that was black from engine soot.
It was forbidden, with punishment of death, to go more than five meters from the train.
Many more died of famine and disease once they had reached their destination.
So not good. Bad stuff, you'd say.
In terms of how Beria feels about this human catastrophe that he's overseeing, we have
his constant notes to Stalin suggesting that he should be awarded for the stunning successes
he'd experienced in doing ethnic cleansings. The war years were indeed good for Beria,
but he had a constant annoyance.
By necessity, the military was given a great deal
of independence and latitude
because you kinda need them, right?
You can't fuck with them the same way
when they're actually the only thing stopping the Nazis.
I can't even purge officers anymore.
Right, right, that is Beria's attitude, right?
Because guys like Zhukov are increasingly
allowed to make major calls and even question Stalin's judgment and Beria's judgment. And
that's going to piss off both Beria and Stalin. Beria does continuously through the war, try
to force his way into making military command decisions. And this is something he's always
bad at. In October of 1941, Soviet pilots spotted German troops
advancing on Moscow.
Beria took the photographs and hid them,
telling everyone they were warmongering
and trying to cause a panic.
Sankster notes that time and time again,
Beria tried to threaten his way into giving orders
to the military, and the military has to go to Stalin
to be like, can you fucking get this guy in pocket?
Like, you know how bad things are right now?
It's October of 41.
Look, Joe, can you point this guy
towards another minority that needs to be sent
to Kazakhstan so he'll leave us alone
for another two weeks?
Have him do another crime against humanity.
We've got some shit to handle here.
Now, one of Beria's more ridiculous blunders
came during the height of the fighting,
when every rifle was needed,
and Beria sought to equip a bunch of his troops,
these NKVD soldiers guarding rear areas
far from the fighting, with the very best weaponry, right?
Because the Soviets are starting to produce
what are legitimately gonna be
some of the best guns of the war, right?
Some of these like first automatic rifles and stuff
that are kind of in wide circulation, and they don't initially have a lot of these, and they're kind of the war, right? Some of these like first automatic rifles and stuff that are kind of in wide circulation.
And they don't initially have a lot of these
and they're kind of all needed.
But Beria wants the shiny toys for his guys,
even though like, well, some dude
who's actually gonna be shooting a bunch of Germans
should probably have these guns before your guys, right?
You're like guarding a train station, maybe.
And when Voronov, who's a top general,
informs Stalin of this, Beria whispers to Voronov who's a top general informs Stalin of this Beria whispers to Voronov just you wait
We'll fix your guts
Such a piece of shit. It sounds like it could be
Simultaneously a threat or the worst pick-up line I've ever heard right right. Yeah
Now Beria reserves a special hatred for Georgi Zhukov because Zhukov reasonably
good at being a general, right? There's again, like anyone who's in this position, a number
of valid criticisms of his command choices here, but he's not an idiot, you know?
He's certainly one of the top two that the Soviet Union produces between him and Bagramian.
Right. Right. And he's in the same,
I would compare him in some ways to a guy like Grant,
where there's times where you can say like,
he's just throwing men into a meat grinder,
but also like, well, I don't know, there weren't,
that was probably unavoidable to some extent.
We can argue how much less it could have been,
but he's in a tough situation.
I wouldn't have wanted his job.
Like sometimes a meat grinder is your only choice.
So we we did a series on the Battle of Kursk a while ago.
And there's this like, oh, no, this is like a solid battle plan.
As long as one of the checklist is like we can we can lose a lot more people
than you can, which is a legitimate military strategy.
It's just it looks really bad on paper later on. Yeah. Yeah, it's ugly
But it's World War two right like Zhukov is and because of this Zhukov is even after the war
He's not totally impervious like he he takes some hits after the war, right?
But even after the war he can't be purged in the same way other guys can because he's fucking Zhukov, right?
You know and very he can't be purged in the same way other guys can because he's fucking Zhukov, right?
You know?
And Barry hates this, right?
This scares the shit out of Stalin
and Barry is kind of just jealous beyond words at the guy.
In May of 1945, as things are winding down
and the Red Army enters Berlin,
it becomes clear that the time of greatest threat
was well passed, right?
Stalin can get back to tightening his grip on power
and these military guys have a little bit less clout
because we're not really at risk of losing anymore, right?
So Beria starts to kind of try to push to get back
to murdering anyone competent, to posing a threat
to whatever bullshit he wants to pull.
And as a result of this, Zhukov winds up
in both Stalin and Beria's sights.
And I'm gonna quote from Amy Knight here.
Beria managed to get his deputy, Ivan Serov, appointed Zhukov's assistant, serving as
chief of the civilian administration in the Soviet zone of Germany.
Henceforth, reports began to trickle back to Stalin about Zhukov, that he was boasting
about his victories and even that he was planning a military conspiracy against Stalin.
Beria's men also did all they could to keep important information hidden from Zhukov.
It turns out, for example,
that he was not told that Hitler's body had been found.
He did not know that autopsies were carried out
and an investigation launched to confirm the identity
as well as the cause of death.
Which is like wild considering what Zhukov's job is
at this time, that you're not letting him know
that you've autopsied Hitler. All of this culminates in J. Stahl denouncing our boy Zhukov's job is at this time that you're not letting him know that you've autopsied Hitler.
All of this culminates in Jay Stahl denouncing our boy Zyukov
near the end of 45 during a meeting at the Kremlin.
Zyukov notably is not at that meeting,
but he is eventually summoned to stand before the war council
and made to answer for his crimes.
It is sometimes suggested that Stalin wanted
to have him executed and he kind of floats this
to the other military leaders of the USSR and they're like, what the fuck are you talking about, man? Zyukov?
You want to kill Zyukov now? That's not going to work out. It says a lot about his position
that Stalin has to back off on this, right? Some of this might just be the fact that like,
Eisenhower and Zyukov are legitimately buddies. One of my favorite cute facts of the war is that they get along so well that Zhukov gets shipped
Coca-Cola, I think, for the rest of his life that's made just for him.
If I remember correctly, Eisenhower also gives Zhukov a fishing kit that he uses.
A tackle box.
Yeah, for he uses for the rest of his life.
If I'm not mistaken, the tackle box that Eisenhower gives him is by his bedside when he dies,
which suggests like, it's not really hard to discuss, like Eisenhower and Zhukov are like the only two guys
that can understand being in that position.
Yeah, they're gonna get along great.
Yeah, I'm not surprised they had some things in common.
So during the war, Beria also makes clever use of the Gulag system that he had helped to
build or at least helped to expand in order to further Soviet war aims in a way that furthered
his career.
This is possible because prior to the outbreak of hostilities, a lot of people who had been
arrested and taken into custody were scientists, engineers, and physicists.
Beria, again, not a dumb man, knows that he doesn't want
to kill these people because you can get officers who are okay, or at least train them up. You
can replace political men. You can't really replace genius scientists and physicists easily,
right? Yeah. So he keeps a lot of these guys in pocket. He has like special prisons for
them that are certainly a lot safer than the other prisons.
When the war really gets running, he gets these guys working designing new weapons systems and
stuff for the Soviet Union. That's one of the things that gives Beria a lot of clout in this
period. He has a lot of these guys who had been out of favor prior to the war. He's able to get
them working. A lot of these guys get their sentences commuted, right? Because they're so necessary.
And this is going to really play into what happens next because Barry is direct involvement in the
production of war material is evidence of not just his general cunning, but his understanding
that his position is based on continually putting himself directly in front of comrade Stalin's eyes
at all times. Whatever Stalin is focused comrade Stalin's eyes at all times.
Whatever Stalin is focused on, Stalin's focused on the war, I need to be making shit for the
war, or at least I need to be facilitating the making of shit for the war, right?
Because that's the way to maintain my position.
After the war, I don't know if you're aware of this, Joe, it ends in the Pacific with
the US dropping a couple of nuclear bombs, right?
I think I've heard of it. Yeah.
Kind of a big deal, the fact that we do this.
And when we drop these bombs, there's a strong argument to be made that the primary reason
we do drop them is to make a big show of force to the Soviet Union, right?
This is heavily debatable.
I certainly don't.
Some people will make the claim that is not supported that like, oh, Japan was right about
to surrender without it.
Like, no, they were like trying to float this thing whereby the emperor would stay
the emperor and they'd get to handle their war criminals on their own. Not really the
same. Yeah, they were not agreeing to unconditional surrender, which was the, I believe since
Yalta was the main and only acceptance they're taking. There's many layers to the atomic bombing.
Right.
And none of this is saying the atomic bombing is a forgivable crime.
I'm not saying that.
Yeah.
But there is, especially when you look into, you know, Operation Downfall, which would
have been the mainland invasion of Japan, which would have been significantly worse
and also still included nuclear weapons.
Right.
You know, things could have been catastrophically worse.
But all of that can be true and also true that we dropped those bombs in large part
because we wanted to make a point to the Russians, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, all those things can be true at the same time.
Right.
And what becomes clear to Stalin and to everybody who's not, who's like, has any level of like,
I don't know, intellect at this point is that
once the US has dropped nukes,
the Soviet Union's going to need nukes of their own, right?
Very quickly.
Not hard to see how they get to that.
And like the whole lesson of the 21st century
is never give up your nukes if the USA's pissed at you, right?
Or if Russia's pissed at you, to be fair.
Nukes are generally like a solid bulletproof vest
to have as a nation
Yeah, if you have them keep the fuckers, right?
Yeah, I don't love that. That's the lesson of the 21st century, but it's hard to argue with and that's why I personally never gave up
My nuclear weapons. No, I know
Yeah, yeah, you know, I I just keep one on me at all times
I like to strap it to my bicycle when I go cycling. People give me a wide berth.
It's part of my everyday carry.
Yeah, yeah, nuke, yeah, flashlight, just the basics.
Seatbelt cutter.
So Joe, if you were tasked with the job
of developing a nuclear arsenal
for your country, neighborhood, or household,
what's your first step gonna be?
Oh, to spy on the people who already have one.
Well, yeah, that is actually exactly what happens, right?
And that's why Stalin is going to eventually appoint Barry it to handle this job, right?
And it's not hard again very it makes a lot of sense Barry is not just a talented organizer
He's proved he's good at kind of the material game. That's a part of figuring out how to make a nuke
He's also pretty good at building a team to like accomplish a goal.
And he's also pretty good at massacring those teams, you know, when they need to be massacred.
Beria is also the spy master and a lot of the Soviet bomb ambitions are going to be,
shall we say, floated by their ability to infiltrate the nuclear weapons programs of
the United States and the United Kingdom, right?
Right.
So, Beria is actually appointed to head up the Soviet atom bomb project on August 7th, 1945,
the day after the US bombs Hiroshima. And he creates a new department at the NKVD,
Department S, which is going to host the agency's nuclear research efforts.
This is not the beginning of Soviet efforts towards developing a bomb, of course.
The Soviet Union does not lack for skilled scientists.
And as early as 1940, Soviet physicist, A.I. Kurchatov,
had given a report to the Academy of Sciences
about how a theoretical nuclear weapon might work.
Petr Kapitska, who is, I think,
probably the most famous Soviet physicist of the era,
had brought the matter up again in 1941.
And the main reason the USSR falls so far behind the US
on this research is they get invaded, right?
That throws a little bit of a wrench in things.
That'll slow you down.
We might not have been able to do the things
that we were doing if we were like fighting the Nazis
and the Sandias, you know?
Probably would have been a little harder
to establish that facility.
Oppenheimer would have been a different movie.
As much nudity, but differently shot, you know?
Still would watch it.
Still would watch it.
So to help make up for this gap that's caused
by the fact that they're fighting this war,
Beria, spy master for the USSR,
starts collecting and disseminating nuclear secrets
from the British, US, and German nuclear programs.
This is something he's doing
all throughout World War II.
Now, one of his best spies is a guy named Klaus Fuchs,
who missed his true calling in joining the adult film industry
and thus was forced to study mathematics and physics.
At age 19, he joined the German Communist Party,
which was difficult because he happened to turn 19 in 1930,
a notably bad time to be a German communist.
Great timing, buddy.
Yeah, really, really bad timing on turning 19, fucks.
Fuchs, whatever.
So when the Nazis take over a few years later,
Fuchs deports himself over to England
and he gets a job as the research assistant
to a professor of physics.
He receives his PhD in 1937 in physics
and then he gets another PhD at the
university of Edinburgh, just for fun.
He applies for British citizenship at this point, but is a little late on the
draw, failing to beat the outbreak of war.
He was interned in Quebec for a spell before one of his professors
pulled strings to let him out.
Basically being like, we're trying to build nukes.
The British atom bomb project, which is under the code name tube alloys,
starts in like, you know, around this time.
And in May of 1941, he gets kind of brought out
of internment to work on this project, right?
So Fuchs' work got him,
I'm basing this on the character from Barry.
I assume it's pretty close to that.
Yeah, I assume it's the same.
They even look probably similar, it's fine.
It's probably played by the same actor
in my heart at least.
So Fuchs' work gets him British citizenship in late 1942.
And it's one of those things where he's a great scientist.
Man, what a reward.
Yeah, becoming British.
Yeah, congratulations, you're now a British citizen.
Like, can I go to Canada still?
Yeah, can I be Canadian maybe?
As soon as he gets this job,
he starts working as a spy for the GRU, right?
More for, I think it's the, I guess the KGB at this point.
I forget, I always mix up my spy agencies.
Again, they go through a bunch of them at this point, right?
But he's handing Soviet spies classified information
about British nuclear ambitions, right?
Kind of through the whole war period.
And he's really good at this, right?
He's good enough at this that not only does no one notice
that he's spying on the British nuclear weapons program
for the Soviet Union, but he gets transferred to Los Alamos
to help the Americans with their much cooler atom bomb.
There he calculates the yield.
I think he's the first guy
to calculate the yield of an atomic blast in a precise manner. And he studies implosion methods.
He's one of the people who's there to see the Trinity test in person. And he continues spying
during this whole period of time, which he sees as his duty to the cause of global communism.
As Russia's spy master, or at least one of them, Beria oversaw the project of using Fuchs
and several other spies who were close to the project.
I found an article published by Columbia University's Atomic Heritage Foundation that notes,
"...Fuchs also passed detailed information about the hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union.
Some experts estimate that Fuchs's intelligence enabled the Soviets to develop and test their
own atomic bomb one to two years earlier than otherwise expected.
And there's a little debate about this.
I think the US is kind of saying at the end of World War II, the Soviets will probably
have their own bomb by 1953 somewhere around there.
Obviously they beat that by several years and 48 is when they do it.
And it's pretty widely agreed.
It's because they have a lot of really good intel from their spies, right?
That this definitely moves up the time frame.
And if I remember correctly, with the first Soviet
nuke is effectively a copy of like one for one copy of the American one.
Yeah, in a lot of ways it is.
I'm not enough of an expert on nukes to lay into that, but it's widely agreed
that all of the spying that Beria is managing moves forward
the timeframe on this significantly, right?
It's possible, maybe Stalin doesn't live to see
a Soviet nuke without the spying program, right?
I don't know how likely that is, but it's possible.
And when it comes to the morality of doing this,
it's kind of something I can't really fault them for, right?
Like I don't like nukes.
I think it's bad that either Trump or Putin right now
could end all civilization on a whim,
but I know the US pretty well.
And if I'm heading up a country
that's already been invaded by us
and realizes they're about to be the big enemy,
I'm gonna try to build my own nuke, you know?
I would do the same thing.
Who wouldn't, right?
Yeah, I mean, like, I mean, like geopolitics is inherently immoral.
You can't bring ethics and morals into geopolitics.
And especially when it comes to, you know, once that the box has been open and
nukes exist, it's kind of a vacation of your
moral obligation,
I guess you could put it, to defend your country if you don't try to get one.
Yeah.
And it is, I think we can look at these nuclear programs
as like Schrodinger's greatest crime against humanity,
where one could argue the fact that the US
and the Soviet Union build so many of these things
stops a more devastating war from occurring, but also at any moment today, they could end
everybody's life.
So we really don't know how this is going to shake out in the long run.
It's one of the biggest motherfuckers of the ultimate defense against a nuclear bomb is
another nuclear bomb.
So you either allow yourself to become a plausible victim of said bombing or build your own doomsday device and
Threaten not with like self-defense. Like if you fuck with me, I will set the atmosphere on fire
If we have a big enough fight everybody dies. Yeah
messy situation
Now Barry it did or Stalin did consider handing the job of Nukesar, which is a thing people
will call Beria and is a pretty cool job.
It's a sick name.
That's my new Ska band name.
Yeah, Nukesar, right?
He considers handing the job initially to the actual scientist Kapitska, but Stalin
decides that someone that famous is a bad pick.
So he picks a lab director named Kurchatov. In general,
management of the program was initially Molotov's duty before Beria gets that job, but Molotov
is bad at this because he's bad at a lot of things. Kurchatov had direct contact with
Beria because Beria is sending him all this info on spies. Near the end of 44, Kurchatov
starts pushing to get Beria the job. One of his colleagues later said,
"'Now, of course, everyone knows
"'that he, Beria, was a bloody hangman.'
"'But at that time, Kurchatov turned to a member
"'of the Politburo, a man with great authority
"'who had influence over Stalin, right?
"'This guy sucked, but he was maybe the best dude
"'for the job, so that's who I wanted to have it, right?'
"'Now, Beria's not actually in the Politburo until 46,
"'but you get the idea. "'These guys wanted to make a bomb, "'and they is not actually in the Politburo until 46, but you get the idea.
These guys wanted to make a bomb and they know that Barry is probably going to be competent
at running the program.
Amy Knight writes about how the project actually got underway.
Much of the construction of building and installation was done by the NKVD since 1946 MVD prisoners.
As was the mining of uranium and radium. Prisoners were also used for atomic
energy research, 50% of which was done in special NKVD centers called Sharashi, such
as those described in Solnitsyn's The First Circle, where highly trained specialists worked
in captivity. The atom bomb project, ironically, shows a gentler side to Beria. It's perhaps
closer to the kind of manager that he would have been if he'd been born later
and gotten a corporate job, right?
When he couldn't murder anyone who pissed him off.
Right, yeah, if he's just like a middle manager at like Sears.
This is because he can't just kill these guys, right?
They're world-class physicists
and there's not an innumerable number of those dudes, right?
He can't run them through violence and threats.
Right, right.
And he doesn't want to torture them
because that might make them not good
at doing the job anymore.
Because torture is generally bad for you being a scientist.
Kapitska is well aware of this
and he does not get along with Beria,
complaining to Stalin that the man wasn't even a scientist
and didn't understand physics.
Beria retorted that Kapitska didn't understand people, and they may have both been kind of
right in this.
Regardless, Kapitsa starts asking Stalin to remove him from the project.
Stalin shows Beria this letter, and Beria invites Kapitsa to come over to his house
for a talk.
Knowing Beria, that usually means he's going to kill you, right?
That's not a good letter.
Yeah, that's not a good letter,
but that's not at all what happens
because he can't really get rid of this guy.
And I'm gonna quote from Knight's book here.
Beria, who apparently wanted to make amends,
then went himself to see Capitza,
bringing with him a magnificent present,
a double-barreled Tula rifle.
He like gives him a gun to try to get him to build a bomb.
It's just such a different Beria than you get the rest of this story. Because he has to kind of turn the oil on a little bit.
There's something like even more evil about this because it tells you this whole time
he didn't have to be the way that he was.
No, no.
He didn't have to be a violent psycho.
He enjoyed it because he could you know
Influence people to get what to do what he wanted them to do by being you know
a middle management people person and instead he's like
I'm gonna beat him to death until their eyes found instead. Yeah
Yeah, there's a future where Barry just gives everybody a gut gives tens of thousands of people guns instead of murdering them
Yeah, um la vrenti barry nra chairman
Right. Yeah, he just goes the uh, the nra route on this speaking of the nra
That's the only supporter of this podcast
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Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa, but how much do
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Ah, we're back!
I'm feeling good. Having a happy day. Having a good time. podcasts. We're back.
I'm feeling good.
Having a happy day, having a good time.
Never want to stop at all.
So let's get back to it.
Perhaps thanks to Fuchs's example, Beria did not trust the scientists that he and the whole
USSR relied on to build their atom bomb.
You know, he's the spy guy, not surprising why.
His NKVD provided strict security
and while the best scientists may not have been murderable,
they were open to other kinds of punishments, right?
You get wildly different accounts of Beria as a manager
and I think based on the amount of coercion
he had to employ for each person,
one of Kurchatov's colleagues later claimed,
Beria was a terrifying man, vile, we all knew this, our very lives depended on him.
But Russian physicist Yuli Keraton had a different take. Beria quickly heartened all work on the
project with necessary scope and dynamism. This man, who personified evil in the country's
modern history, possessed at the same time tremendous vigor and efficiency. It was impossible
not to admit his intellect, willpower and purposefulness.
He was a first class manager, able to bring every job to his conclusion.
And I can't tell you who's closer to right.
Perhaps it's just a matter of opinion based on what your job was.
I mean, honestly, from everything that we've heard, it sounds like the second guy is probably
true. Yeah.
Like he's an evil fucker, but like every single job
he's been put in charge of, with the exception
of weaseling his way into military operations,
he's incredibly good at.
He has like, impacable attention to detail
because he's a fucking insane person.
Right, he's a huge asshole.
But he does, like this works well. The Soviets get their bomb
pretty fucking quick. You know, Barry also helps head up the recruitment of former Nazi scientists
for atomic research, which is the thing that the Soviets do with almost as much gusto as the United
States. Now, one thing I will give the Soviet Union initially is that unlike in the US, their
Nazi scientists are basically put in prison at first and every activity is carefully monitored and their
liberty is curtailed because they're Nazis, right?
Beria actually changes this because he goes to visit the factory basically where these
guys are working and he's like, well, you're not meeting any of your timetables, what's
wrong?
And they're like, well, we're in prison and that's not very fun.
And so he actually reforms the conditions for these German scientists and like makes
their lives a lot nicer.
Yeah, memory serves me.
It serves me well.
The Soviets actually took in more Nazi scientists.
Yeah, yeah.
And Beria is responsible for them treating them a lot better, you know, which from a
managerial standpoint is a good idea from a moral standpoint not great
Yeah, but again that has area written all over it like we're very very serious middle manager
Like we like we've discussed he's an incredibly efficient bastard. What are the most efficient honestly?
Yeah, yeah, very efficient and like, for again, obviously the right decision from a making
a nuke faster point of view, right?
Beria is present both for the start of the first Soviet atomic reactor on December 25th,
1946, and the detonation of their first atom bomb on August 29th, 1949.
There is a fun coda to that story.
After the successful blast, he kissed Kurchatov
and said, in essence, thank God this worked.
I would have had to kill somebody otherwise.
But after that-
God forbid I'll have to go back to the old me.
Yeah, I don't wanna have to go back to the old me.
But then after this like moment of elation,
he starts to panic again because he's like,
oh my God, what if this doesn't,
didn't look like the American blast, right?
Is my mushroom cloud normal?
Do I have, did I have a good mushroom cloud, daddy?
And he has to call one of his spies
who'd been at the Los Alamos tests
to confirm that their nuke blast was normal.
It's beautiful, Beria.
You've got a really good mushroom cloud.
You should be really proud.
Nobody wants to hear about the mushroom cloud
measuring competition.
Nobody wants to hear about the bigger mushroom cloud
that they got to experience a few years
before your mushroom cloud.
Stalin's gonna love it, man.
He's gonna really like it.
Don't feel bad, Beria.
Don't worry, Lavrenty.
What's more important is with, not like.
And I talk about this a lot, Joe.
I think it's really my primary moral issue
with the Oppenheimer movie is that it provides this
like really unrealistic expectation
for how a mushroom cloud should look.
And I think a lot of secret policemen
and dictators out there working on their own nukes
are gonna feel like my nuke isn't good enough
if it doesn't look like the Oppenheimer nuke.
And that's just, it's fucked up, you know?
It's the same as having Channing Tatum's beautiful abs out on display for everybody to look at.
It sets an unreasonable standard, you know?
It's not fair.
All nukes are beautiful.
They're keeping all of us with, you know, normal sized mushroom clouds, making us very
self-conscious about the horrific devastation that our mushroom
cloud can cause.
I want to know what movie you're thinking of with Channing Tatum.
That's what I want to know.
All of them.
Magic Mike, of course.
Magic Mike, of course.
I know.
I just wanted to make sure that your reference was in fact from like 10 years ago, like it
usually is.
I just want to say, because I know Kim Jong Un listens to this podcast a lot Your nukes are valid your your world-ending hell weapons are beautiful and I see you Kim Jong-un
You know, I just want him to know I just want him to know that and I feel the same to the British whatever fucking shit
They call a nuke right? It's good enough guys. It's good enough
It's a smoke cloud and beans come oozing out
It's a enough. It's just a smoke cloud and beans come oozing out. It's a fucking chip buddy sandwich, yeah. I already call those butter and potato chip sandwiches.
Yeah, they've got one of those loaded onto a sub.
Why not, right?
At the point at which they use them, it doesn't matter.
So anyway, Barry eventually gets convinced
that his nuke is good enough and he calls Stalin.
This is like the chief moment of it.
He's so excited to get to tell his boss,
we've got a nuke now and all Stalin says is I've heard
and then hangs up.
Such a Stalin move.
He can't like praise him too much.
No, absolutely.
You gotta be really careful in this moment, right?
And Beria gets furious and he threatens the operator
on the phone line and he's like,
"'You have put a spoke in my wheel, traitor.
"'I'll grind you to a pulp.'"
He's like, oh, my name is Steve?
Oh, you know, you named the telephone operator
sitting right next to you, like,
yeah, if you have any complaints.
So this was possibly the fact that Stalin responds this way, evidence of his growing
dissatisfaction and distrust in Beria, right?
Which is heightened by the fact that in these post-war years, Stalin is deteriorating rapidly.
He had always been paranoid.
World War II ages him.
Not hard to see why, right? And in fact, a famous neurologist,
Stalin had been having issues for a while.
In 1927, a famous Russian neurologist had diagnosed him
with paranoia and Stalin had had the man poisoned.
In 1937, another one of his doctors had written of Stalin.
He was headstrong, consistent,
and had extraordinary willpower and nerves of iron.
Excellent memory.
He's separate mainly from two pathological states,
megalomania and a persecution complex.
Stalin had this guy shot.
And there's also like,
most of the best doctors in the Soviet Union
got taken out during the doctor's plot.
Right, well, yeah, that's coming up.
But even before that,
Stalin is having guys purged from saying like hey, man
Maybe take some CBD homie. You know like chill out a little bit
Like the sixth or seventh doctor to get whacked for like giving some a diagnosis you have you're you're the eighth doctor that has to go
In like nah dude is jacked yo dick down to his grave
Dude is jacked yoke dick down to his grave. He is the pinnacle of Russian 12 pack my god I've never seen so many abs
I've never said I never seen a man have abs on his legs before and you know what even though he's not Russian
He's Georgian. He is the pinnacle of Russian manliness
Nothing wrong absolutely your knees are actually additional abs. It's remarkable. I've never seen anything like it
I've never seen anything like it.
I've never seen a dick do a pushup before.
It was incredible.
So there's probably not much that medically
could have been done about the fact
that Stalin is increasingly unhinged
and it starts to have,
especially in the kind of this late period,
a series of strokes that are steadily degrading
his capacity to function.
We don't know precisely what's going on, right?
We can intuit some from the actual medical reports we have and just some from his symptoms
that this is like he's stroking out and he is gradually losing his ability to function
as a result of that.
And I found a paper on Stalin's last years for the European Journal of Neurology, which
summarizes the boss's state in the late 40s
and early 50s quite well.
Quote, after the war, Stalin's natural suspiciousness
and fears reached new heights.
He admitted to Marshal Georgi Zhukov,
the commander in chief of the Soviet armies,
to living in fear of his own shadow.
Silence terrified him.
At a Politburo dinner,
he noticed Andrei Zdanov sitting silently.
Stalin exploded.
Look at him sitting there like Christ, as if nothing was of concern to him.
Zdanoff paled with fear.
Stalin also complained about Wladyslaw Gomułka, secretary of the Polish Communist Party.
He sits there all the time, looking into my eyes as though we were reaching for something.
And why does he bring a notepad and pencil with him?
Why does he write down every word I say? He's just losing his mind
And you know he was starting to stroke out when he started just demanding people put their own tomatoes in the pockets and then
Yeah, surprise because he couldn't do it anymore. Yeah, he can't he doesn't have the dexterity
in
1951 in front of Politburo members
Anastas Mikoyan and Nikita Khrushchev, whom he did not appear to notice.
Stalin exclaimed, I'm finished.
I trust no one, not even myself.
One of the more lucid things he says in this period,
you probably shouldn't have.
The last person on earth I would trust
if I was Joseph Stalin, was also Joseph Stalin.
Look, he wasn't wrong all the time.
So Stalin had demoted Beria,
making him resign his post running the NKVD in 1946.
But this was not really a big deal.
Beria had retained most of his influence
at least for a while.
He's still running this critical bomb project.
And like, it's actually kind of a reasonable thing
to do objectively.
Building a nuke is a big job.
You probably, both of these,
you might not do them as well, right?
Yeah.
You know, we probably need someone else
to handle that kind of stuff.
You know, I made sure when Cool Zone
started its nuclear weapons program,
I made sure that we took other stuff off of Danil's plate,
you know, just because I want him to,
I want him to get that bomb ready for us.
It's the only way we're gonna win against the pod save guys.
What, Sophie? We've tried peace with them. It's simply not way we're gonna win against the pod save guys What Sophie?
We've tried peace with them. It's simply not an option anymore
I mean, this is this is also why I have attached listening devices to all of your animals
So I could then steal your nuclear weapons for my podcast. That's right. That's right. You're really
And soon we'll have mutually assured destruction, which is gonna take us both to a new level in podcasting
It's the only thing that we could possibly do. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's it's the logical next step
I should have accept our I accepted our offer for peace. I feel like we were really fair
Yeah, we were really fair. All we wanted was to deport them to the east
Yeah, I'm trying to landing Kazakhstan New York City where they all live anyway
I could do Kazakhstan, you know?
So international observers at the time kind of noted
that like this could have been taken out
of directly leading the NKBD,
actually might've worked out for Beria in the longterm.
There was a way in which this could have been a real win
for him because like it's dangerous
being the secret police head.
Stalin is going to die.
And when he does, if you're running the secret police,
historically there's a good chance
you're gonna get purged, right?
Because we've already covered this wave a few times, right?
You have so many purges.
You purge the purger, right?
This could have, this might have,
and it kind of almost does,
put Beria in a natural position
to be Stalin's successor, which seems to be what Beria wanted, right? But the fact that he is kind
of obviously positioned as one of the potential successors also puts him in the crosshairs of an
increasingly irrational and paranoid Joseph Stalin. Now, as you talked about a little earlier, Stalin doesn't like
his doctors, right? And he's having Beria arrest growing numbers of them in this period
of time. And as he's, again, he's convinced, this is also married to Stalin's anti-Semitism,
which gets really unhinged in the 50s, in the early 50s, right? Like he is kind of going
off the rails. Some people will say he might have done his version of the Holocaust had he stayed alive long enough
That's really unprovable in any way shape or form
But it's not impossible right knowing the guy
He certainly is a lot part of why he's having a lot of these doctors arrested and even killed is because they're Jewish and he
Doesn't trust them right of course. I'm all Gibson's been training his whole life for this role. Right, right. Again, he would be a good pick for Stalin.
Now, because he distrusts his doctors and has had barrier arresting so many of these guys,
Stalin starts taking health advice from a less than trustworthy source, primarily one of his
bodyguards who had previously been trained as a veterinarian. fuck? Yeah, we're getting like the Soviet version
Yeah, I love this guy this fucking vet who's coming in like well
I know how to fucking remove a shit from a horse's impacted colon. Yeah, I can probably handle your hypertension
And the treatment he gives Stalin for hypertension is boiled water with iodine
I don't think that's what you want to do
for your hypertension.
Comrade Stalin, you must put Jade Egg up your man pussy.
This is by the way, there's a new show on the regime.
Oh yeah, I'm watching it, it's incredible.
I think it's really solid.
I think it's mostly, there's a little Stalin,
it's mostly seems to be based on Ceausescu.
Yeah.
But you get a little Hitler, you get a little Stalin,
you get a little bit of Trump, obviously, in there too.
It's good though, it's actually like really,
I think, pretty smart and the,
obviously Kate Winslet is really good at it
and also the male lead, I think, is very good.
I didn't like him in the first episode,
but I've liked him a lot.
I just binge watched the whole thing yesterday.
I'm still just like three episodes in,
but I'm a big fan so far.
Anyway, I say this because it's kind of covering a dictator
in the same sort of period that Stalin is in, right?
When they're starting to lose their mind
and fall for all this bullshit health stuff, right?
In 1948, Stalin has Molotov's wife, who is Jewish, arrested for treason.
That same year, he demotes Beria.
And this is really what hits Beria, right?
The 1946 one, generally seen as like not actually a loss for Beria, he actually starts to carve
away a lot of his power after 48.
He is convinced of a, obviously of a Jewish conspiracy that involves a lot of these doctors
in Moscow.
And he has his security services take action against them.
And I'm going to quote from an article by Mark Safranski published by ASU Center for
Strategic Communication.
Most of the unfortunate doctors who were arrested by the KGB and lavishly tortured had conspicuously
Jewish names.
They were accused of planning to kill comrade Stalin
and having killed Zdanov.
And this was all too reminiscent of the Kirov case
that launched the great terror.
And again, because like Zdanov dies,
there's this belief that he had been killed
by this like Jewish plot.
That's part of the evidence that people will say that like,
if Stalin had lived longer,
things could have gotten real fucking ugly, right?
Because this mirrors the situation that leads have gotten real fucking ugly, right? Because this mirrors the situation
that leads us to the great terror, right?
Now the doctor's plot and this kind of obsession
with anti, you know, this Jewish conspiracy
that Stalin believes,
this is not the only paranoid fantasy panic
that he has in his ailing years.
And the one that's going to hit Beria the hardest
is the Mingrelian affair.
Now, this hasn't been a big part of the story
because Beria doesn't identify super strongly
as a Mingrelian nationalist, right?
But we talked about this.
This is that like kind of ethnic minority within Georgia
that Beria is a part of, right?
Around the kind of last period of his life,
Stalin cooks up this theory
about a Mingrelian nationalist ring that is urging a separate ethnostate with the backing of quote
Western imperialists which like obviously the US has plenty of plots to
try to like take out the Soviet Union during this period I don't think this is
one of them I've never come into any evidence that we're trying to
establish a Mingrelian state in Georgia as As they say, as McGrelia goes, so goes the Soviet Union.
Yeah, I think if you had brought this up
to any of the guys running the US,
they would have been like, Ming what now?
Ming the Merciless?
Is that in fucking Mongolia or something?
What are you talking about?
Yeah, what are you talking about?
What are you saying, it's in Georgia?
There's a Mingrelian grill in Atlanta?
That fucking wits, let's go.
Oh shit, yeah, let's take a ride.
So Stalin launches a brutal purge
of the Georgian Communist Party,
targeting Mingrelian members to be arrested and shot.
And because these guys are Mingrelian
and Barry is the kind of guy he is,
a lot of these are his protegees, right?
Like Stalin is kind of,
and I don't know that Stalin really believes
this is happening, I think it's likelier he is trying to get rid
of Beria's support base.
And this is a convenient way to do that, right?
Now, if you know Lavrenty, again,
his identity isn't huge to him,
but this really like does damage again,
to kind of like a lot of the people
that he's going to rely on once Stalin is out
to help him take power.
On the night of February 28th, 1953,
Stalin holds his normal dinner party at his dacha.
As usual, it lasted until almost dawn.
While Stalin is usually not a heavy drinker,
he's kind of, he'll have a little bit of watered down wine,
he'll water down some vodka, you know,
and he'll get kind of buzzed.
He's usually pretty buzzed.
He doesn't get hammered.
He likes everyone else to get hammered
because then he's in control, right?
Cause he's Stalin, you know?
But this night, it's noted at least,
and again, everyone who was there,
none of them are reliable narrators,
but also medically it makes sense
that this would have happened.
The people who were there say he got fucking hammered
tonight, that night, right?
And that would have, because he is a guy with untreated hypertension, getting drunk when
you have untreated hypertension will raise your blood pressure, right?
I mean, getting drunk raises your blood pressure.
And if you have untreated hypertension, that can cause a stroke, which is what happens,
probably.
Stalin has a stroke and a fatal intracranial hemorrhage.
This is essentially where the movie, The Death of Stalin begins, right?
I'm going to guess a lot of people have seen that.
And again, the specifics, it doesn't really get a lot of them right.
But I think if you watch the movie, the broad strokes of it are close enough for what most
people would actually need to know about how this functioned, right?
Beria, as is depicted in the movie like everyone else
Probably thrilled to see his boss struck down because he had very clearly been on this on the chopping block, right?
Yeah, he was on his way out one horrible way. It's not like Brian's gonna get retired to his dacha or something He was getting he was even the millimeter based pension plan
Right, right, right
Now there was probably would have been a Makarov, right?
Nine by 18, judging by the time period is my guess.
So there's no obvious successor
and Stalin's inner circle jockeyed for position around him.
Khrushchev and Beria are the most capable plotters
of the group.
And the two initially worked together to push out Malenkov.
But then Khrushchev turns around and allies with Malenkov against Beria, right?
We don't need to rehash the whole thing,
but there's this kind of interregnum period
of a few months after Stalin's death, right?
The movie condenses it to a much shorter period of time,
but there's a bit of space there, right?
And these are busy months, right?
Beria's first thing he's gonna do
is carry out the series of mass releases from prison, right? Of all these guys he had had locked months, right? Barry, his first thing he's gonna do is carry out this series of mass releases from prison, right?
Of all these guys he had had locked up, right?
And he pushes a slurry of reforms as well.
Sheila Fitzpatrick actually credits him primarily
with the early reforms that follow Stalin's death,
writing, within six weeks,
as head of the security police,
he had released the Jewish doctors,
investigated Nicole's death, and informed the team of Stalin Stalin's involvement forbidden the use of torture and interrogations transferred much of the MVDs
That's the NKVDs industrial empire to civilian ministries and set in motion the release of more than a million prisoners from the gulags
I mean this has to be just saving face at the last minute, right? Well, yes
Yes
This is not none of these guys, all of these guys, anyone who has lived
in Stalin's inner circle this long,
you don't do things for reasons other than survival, right?
Of course not, you know, you wouldn't have lived that long
if you were that kind of fella, you know?
So again, I don't credit this with him doing it
out of the goodness of his heart,
but it does show like where his mind is
of like what I need to do to position myself, which is I need to be the guy who's pushing all of
these reforms as fast and hard as I possibly can.
Now he also cleans house at the MVD, which is again the successor to, it's the NKVD,
and he replaces these guys who had been put into a road, his power base with some of his
own people who were still remaining, right?
Khrushchev and the other Inner Circle members
know Barry is dangerous and they've known him long enough
that he is not the guy they want holding their lives
in his hands.
I think their fear-
They also know if he takes over,
I imagine that they all know that they're getting
the millimeter pension as well.
Right, right.
That's their assumption.
Is that like, he's gonna do another great purge
once he's in power and we're all fucked
if we don't stop this. He kinda has no choice.
They know too much about him.
Right, right.
And it is interesting.
We'll talk about this a little bit at the end,
but let me get through the rest of this first.
So the plot to unseat Beria is delayed for a bit
by a rebellion in East Germany
that they have to crack down on.
But once that calms down after June, 1953,
plans continue anew.
And this is where Zhukov comes back into it.
It's Zhukov and one of his men, General Kirill Moskalenko.
Since Barry has got this iron grip on the police, the military is the only group of
guys with guns who you can trust to take him down.
So the plotters, again, this is kind of organized around Khrushchev and Malenkov, gather 10
officers to their banner and in a June 26th meeting at the Presidium ambush Beria at the
start of what is supposed to be a Politburo meeting.
Here's how writer Sheryl Rofer describes what happens next.
Beria, as usual, arrived just before the meeting was to start.
Malenkov changed the agenda to focus specifically on Beria's activities.
This was a complete surprise to Beria.
Malenkov laid out Beria's misdeeds and alleged that Beria had been seeking to displace the
collective leadership and to foment discord among Presidium members.
He then proposed a number of possible remedies, all of which included removing Beria from
the posts he held.
He invited the other members of the Presidium to join in enumerating Beria's mistakes,
which they did.
This put them on record as supporting Beria's removal.
As Malenkov summed up the accusations, he pressed the button to alert the military,
who marched into the room.
He then declared that Beria is so cunning and so dangerous that only the devil knows
what he might do now.
I therefore propose that we arrest him immediately.
Moskalenko brought out their guns and arrested and searched Beria.
So again, one of the big differences,
it's not Zhukov who's there with all the guns
showing up in the room to like,
it's this other guy who's working with Zhukov.
I think probably just because Zhukov doesn't know
that it's gonna work and it's a little bit too canny,
a survivor don't wanna put his own neck
on the line right there.
I know which one I like to envision
is Oscar Isaac storming in there with an AK.
It's much better in the movie.
And everyone's great in that movie.
I mean fucking-
He owns it though.
He is having such a good time.
I would never have fucking called, oh God, what's his name?
The guy who plays Kruschev.
Steve Buscemi.
Yeah, I would never have called Steve Buscemi as Kruschev, but he is an excellent Kruschev. Oh, what's his name? The guy who plays Khrushchev? Steve Buscemi. Yeah, I would never have called Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, but he is an excellent Khrushchev.
Oh, it's great. Really. Yeah. And the guy they got from Molotov, I don't even know what his name is,
but he was really good too. Everybody's great in that movie.
Barry is not killed on the spot as he is in the movie, but he is arrested and tried on December 10th.
He is executed on December 23rd. Now the common view, and the one put
forward in Death of Stalin, was that he was the most frightening and evil of the Politburo
members, right? And even his fellow members felt that they had to take action against
him. There's a strong argument to be made that the main thing they feared from Beria
was that he was a reformer. And this gets into, again, some unprovable stuff, but you
have to remember, Barry is
a guy who believes primarily in his own power.
He is not ideologically committed to communism like a lot of these other guys are.
He's certainly not nearly as much as a guy like Molotov was, right?
And he is open for a lot more reform than other members of the Politburo.
And this is the argument that Amy Knight makes.
Quote, the changes he advocated were so bold and far reaching that while greeted with relief
by the public, they alarmed his colleagues.
Ironically, it was Khrushchev, acclaimed later as a courageous de-Stalinizer, who was chiefly
responsible for putting a halt to Beria's reforms by leading the plot against him.
As this biography suggests, Beria's program aimed at undermining the Stalinist system
and therefore might have led to its demise.
Khrushchev's policies, while reformist,
in fact perpetuated Stalinism.
Though Khrushchev eliminated the role of police terror,
many would argue the system remained essentially totalitarian.
And obviously that's a deeply debatable point.
I'm not a historian, but I just wanted to note
that there is, you know, that is an argument people will make.
I think you could very easily make the argument
that it would have been a lot worse
if Beria had wound up in charge of the USSR too.
I think both things can, like we've said multiple times,
both things can 100% be true
because there's a very good chance
that there could have been reforms,
but I think as great as that chance was,
the chance was much greater
that you would have experienced
some form of great purge first.
Right, right. I think that's a solid point. greater that you would have experienced some form of great purge first. Right.
Right.
I think that's a solid point.
Now, one thing that I will kind of note here that is interesting is that after they get
rid of Beria, there's more purging among the Politburo, right?
Khrushchev is going to do his version of cleaning house, but they stop killing each other, right?
It's almost as if there's this kind of attitude
after Barry is gone that like,
anybody who's lived up to this point,
I may have to get them out of power.
I may have to like, you know,
push him into a country house or something,
but like, I don't want to kill any of these guys.
Like we're all the only ones who made it.
I don't want to like murder these other guys anymore.
Let's stop.
And they do, right?
Khrushchev doesn't massacre all of his
You know former Politburo colleagues and when Khrushchev gets forced out, he's allowed to live, you know, right, right
I wonder honestly, I'm just just curious if
Baria would have taken the same turn because maybe maybe he would have seen the point of all the mad because again
He's a practical efficient person right right unfortunately
Yeah, practicality and efficiency devoid of humanity equals just the banality of pure terror and evil which is what he was
So like it's it's curious to wonder if he's like, oh, we don't really need to do that anymore
So I don't really I don't really care. Yeah, it's the same nothing of what he was doing in his own personal time, but right, right, you know
Yeah, it will never know it. I think it is possible that like he's more or less
he's not all that different from Khrushchev in terms of like
Kind of ratcheting down the massacres and stuff. Maybe no way to know that's certainly not the argument that night makes
he seems like to me as a guy that that saw violence as
He seems like to me as a guy that that saw violence as
Just a means to an end there was no personality or I like we said there's no ideology attached to a he's like So well, you know killing people is the most the quickest way to complete my goal
And until it isn't you know, it's not the most efficient way to do it anymore. So I don't need to do it anymore
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, possibly
way to do it anymore. So I don't need to do it anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Possibly. Um, anyway, Joe, that is the
Lavrenti Barrier story. Hopefully this is helpful, you
know, when you become the secret police chief of a country
governing roughly one-fifth of the world's landmass. We all
have to have dreams. I'm glad that I know I now have some
research material. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, I'll get that other
half or one-fifth of the world's landmass and then we that I now have some research material. Yeah, yeah, hopefully I'll get that other half
or one fifth of the world's land mass
and then we can really start making some nukes.
We can make some form of pact, non-aggression ones.
Right, right, those always end well.
Anyway, I'm gonna go hang out with my friend
who's helping me organize this plan.
He's really quiet but very organized.
I think things are gonna go great with him.
Seems like a good guy to have in this situation. Where's tiny glasses?
Georgia real smallest glasses you've ever seen in your life
Anyway, we're done
Goodbye
Well, actually not goodbye Joe you got any pluggables to plug?
I'm the host of the lines on by donkey's podcast
We talked about military history disasters horrible things and similar to this
and we've talked about a lot of topics that are
Vaguely connected to barrier and the Soviet Union during World War two like the Battle of Kirst the Battle of Stalingrad
The Winter War things like that
I also write military science fiction and you can find my newest series,
The Undying Legion, wherever it is you cop your books at.
Yeah, check that stuff out.
And, you know, I don't know.
Don't deport people if you can avoid it.
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