Speaker 1: Also media here, everyone, Robert Evans here, and before we
Speaker 1: get to the episode, obviously a lot of people in
Speaker 1: Gaza need a lot of different help. But we've been
Speaker 1: connected to the Algazawi family by a friend of ours
Speaker 1: who's doing aid work there right now. They are trying
Speaker 1: to get fourteen members of their family out of Gaza
Speaker 1: before you know, things get any worse for them, and
Speaker 1: they're raising money to do so on go fund me.
Speaker 1: If you google help al Gazawi family escape Gaza go
Speaker 1: fund Me, you can find it. Algazawie is spelled a
Speaker 1: l g h a zz a w I.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We're trying to help them, you know, get to a
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Speaker 1: welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that
Speaker 1: makes you sad. That's the promise we make with Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards is that after listening to this episode, your
Speaker 1: life will be worse. And to help me make your
Speaker 1: life worse, the Great Joe Kasebian Joe, welcome to the program.
Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me back. I'm glad to finally
Speaker 2: get my my Behind the Bastards hat trick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, wait, what's the hat trick?
Speaker 3: So that's a sports reference that you know that you
Speaker 3: should really know.
Speaker 1: I was about to say, because I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: know you as a hat guy, Joe.
Speaker 3: Three times in oh okay, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: So for everybody listening, they have to take their hat
Speaker 2: off and throw it somewhere anyway.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, Well, well, well they're all busy doing that,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna throw you a story of a real piece
Speaker 1: of ship.
Speaker 2: Joe.
Speaker 1: What do you know? Joe Kasabian, host of the Lions
Speaker 1: Led by Donkeys podcast, author of several books. What's your latest, Joe?
Speaker 2: So my latest up front? Now, yeah, I have a
Speaker 2: military science fiction series coming out. The first two books
Speaker 2: are are currently out. You have The Undying The whole
Speaker 2: series is called The Undying Legion. So if you look
Speaker 2: up the Undying Legion series or my name, you could
Speaker 2: find it. Uh. And the first two books are currently
Speaker 2: out and the third book will be out next month.
Speaker 1: Excellent, exegon excellent. And you also have your work of nonfiction,
Speaker 1: The Hooligans of Kandahar. People should check out all of
Speaker 1: your books. Now you know who didn't write fiction, but
Speaker 1: did lie enough to be considered a fiction writer. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: Lavrinti Barrio. What do you know about Lavrinti Barria. No, yeah, oh.
Speaker 2: I would be brought in for Burrio, wouldn't I?
Speaker 1: Oh he is.
Speaker 2: He is.
Speaker 1: If you've watched the Death of Stalin, he's the bad guy.
Speaker 1: I mean everyone is the bad guy and the Death
Speaker 1: of Stalin except for maybe Zukov, but he's the bad guy,
Speaker 1: and the Death of Stalin's the dad guy everything. He
Speaker 1: was the bad guy in real life too, one of them.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: We open like a lot of our episodes with like
Speaker 1: comparisons to the usually the Nazis. Right, we'll call King
Speaker 1: Leopold the Hitler of African colonialism, or like the British
Speaker 1: Empire slow Nazis, because Nazis are like everyone's touchstone for
Speaker 1: the absolute depths of human evil. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that's interesting about Laventi Barria is that Stalin himself
Speaker 1: compared him to a Nazi during the Yalta I think
Speaker 1: it was the Yalta Conference. When he's talking to like
Speaker 1: FDR he calls Barria r Himmler. Like that's how he
Speaker 1: introduces Barrier to the President, like, this is my Himmler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got one too.
Speaker 2: We all got a Himmler. Everybody's got Churchill after Churchill
Speaker 2: like said, Stalin is a bastard, but he's our bastard.
Speaker 2: He's like, yeah, he's Himmler, but he's our Himmler.
Speaker 1: He's our Hemmler. It's cool, we got one. I actually
Speaker 1: don't agree with that comparison. He's not much like Himmler.
Speaker 1: I guess he kind of you know, Himler runs the SS,
Speaker 1: Barrier runs the Secret Police, because that's the comparison. But
Speaker 1: like Himmler is a hardcore believer, right, Himler is not
Speaker 1: like a like a fair weather Nazi. He's like he's
Speaker 1: like into the occult. He's trying to He's got a
Speaker 1: castle where he's doing rituals and shit.
Speaker 4: Like.
Speaker 1: One thing you can say about Himler is he believed
Speaker 1: all that kookie nonsense, really into witches, really into witches.
Speaker 1: I don't think Barria believed. I don't think Barria was
Speaker 1: really like in his I don't think Barria Barry was
Speaker 1: a communist and that that was like the system he
Speaker 1: worked in. But I don't think he was like a
Speaker 1: hardcore believer.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Maria was a was a power guy, right, and he
Speaker 1: was going to do whatever would get him into power.
Speaker 2: He I think he was the kind of guy my
Speaker 2: knowledge of Barria is like he would have been. He
Speaker 2: would have glommed onto any system that would allow him
Speaker 2: to do what he did right right.
Speaker 1: He would have at least attempted to do, which I don't
Speaker 1: do to like take any blame away from the horrible
Speaker 1: state communist system that existed in the USSR, particularly under Stalin.
Speaker 1: It's just that's not the kind of dude Barria was.
Speaker 1: He was a consummate opportunist. It's just the love of
Speaker 1: the game. He just loves being an asshole in a government,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: He was. He would have the excels. That's just such
Speaker 2: a good.
Speaker 1: Piece of ship. I had a line in here about
Speaker 1: how he's got a body count only rivaled by these
Speaker 1: Australian dudes I met once in a Berlin hostel, but
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure if that was an obvious enough joke.
Speaker 1: Don't don't room next to Australians and a hostile guys.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's just a mess, you know. The don't
Speaker 1: true Australians. Don't room next to Australians anywhere. Don't stay away.
Speaker 1: That's why they're on that island.
Speaker 2: You know they need to be there. It's the only
Speaker 2: thing that contains them is the isolation and countless venomous
Speaker 2: animals that will murder them if they step on a line.
Speaker 1: Would you get kicked out of the UK for being
Speaker 1: too much of a hooligan? You know it says something.
Speaker 1: There's one thing I can say positive of Australians. I
Speaker 1: love the national pastime of hooning. Yes, I have to
Speaker 1: give them shit because Australians and Texans are the two
Speaker 1: peoples on the world that are like closest in their
Speaker 1: in their overall temperament, and neither of us likes to
Speaker 1: hear it, but it's it's undeniable when you spend time
Speaker 1: with both.
Speaker 2: Australia is Texas. If Texas wasn't connected to anything else, yeah,
Speaker 2: if we will vacuum.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Texas, a lot of people say that Texas
Speaker 1: of Eastern Europe is Georgia. I don't know if anyone's
Speaker 1: ever said that.
Speaker 2: Joe actually as someone who lived in both Texas and Georgia.
Speaker 1: All lot, Well, that's where our friend Barria is born
Speaker 1: and Georgia the country is in a tough historic position.
Speaker 2: If you just look at.
Speaker 1: A map, you can and you and you have a
Speaker 1: vague knowledge of like the last thousand years, you can
Speaker 1: like put together in your heads some of the problems
Speaker 1: Georgia was likely to have had. Right, they're kind of
Speaker 1: in the middle. If you're if you're the Terps, right,
Speaker 1: if you're the Ottomans, Georgia is in the way of
Speaker 1: where you want to get to, right.
Speaker 2: That's Europe.
Speaker 1: George is also in the way of getting to places
Speaker 1: you want to go. If you're Russia, George's in the way.
Speaker 1: They're just kind of they're one of those speed bump countries,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna wind up having kind of a tumultuous
Speaker 1: history as a result of just kind of being in
Speaker 1: the middle of a bunch of shit. So, by the
Speaker 1: end of the seventeen hundreds, Russia has won most of
Speaker 1: Eastern Georgia in a gentleman's game of murder each other
Speaker 1: with the Ottomans. Russian interest in the area peaked whenever
Speaker 1: the Turks looked tired or weak, and would fade whenever
Speaker 1: Turkey looked like it really wanted to throw hands. By
Speaker 1: the middle of the eighteen hundreds, this tug of war
Speaker 1: had gone Russia's way often enough that most of Georgia
Speaker 1: winds up in possession of the Czars, who treated the
Speaker 1: Georgians about as carefully as they treated everything else. Right,
Speaker 1: not great, it's not great, about.
Speaker 2: As great as Russia currently treats Georgians within sporters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a generally accurate way to look at it.
Speaker 1: So Georgians buy and larger, not thrilled with this situation.
Speaker 1: But since the Turks hadn't really been any better, some
Speaker 1: of them started looking at some radical solutions to their
Speaker 1: having a government problem. And socialism's kind of the new
Speaker 1: hotness at this point. So in Georgia, socialism is kind
Speaker 1: of it becomes kissing cousins with nationalism, right, And by
Speaker 1: the start of the nineteen hundreds there were two broad
Speaker 1: socialist groups that were kind of gaining influence in Georgia.
Speaker 1: You got your Mensheviks and you got your Bolsheviks. Bolsheviks
Speaker 1: basically means the majority party and Mensheviks means the minority party.
Speaker 1: But the Mensheviks are much more numerous than the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of a fuck game there, right.
Speaker 1: The Mensheviks are kind of it's not really accurate to
Speaker 1: view them as social Democrats the way we know them,
Speaker 1: but they're closer to that than what becomes the government
Speaker 1: of the Soviet Union, right, and that sounds pretty good
Speaker 1: to a lot of Georgians. And so the Mensheviks are larger,
Speaker 1: they're more organized than the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks are
Speaker 1: going to spend all of subsequent history pretending it had
Speaker 1: always been the other way around.
Speaker 2: Right Again, that sounds very familiar, exact same like, I'm
Speaker 2: Armenian and Georgians and Armenians are the brothers culturally, very
Speaker 2: very very similar. Even in our own revolutionary history of
Speaker 2: like the First Republic of Armenia, the conflict between the
Speaker 2: Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks is literally identical. Yes, yes, it's
Speaker 2: through the Caucuses in general, the story is, the story rhymes.
Speaker 1: And this is you know, Barria is a little more
Speaker 1: Georgia focused, but he also he spends most of his
Speaker 1: early career in his aerba Jan and he is kind
Speaker 1: of his whole life is his whole early political career
Speaker 1: is in the trans Caucuses. Because you, as you said,
Speaker 1: you can't really separate a zerba Jan, Armenia, Georgia during
Speaker 1: this kind of revolutionary period and what had once been
Speaker 1: the Russian Empire, like they're all very tied together.
Speaker 2: Once they became the one country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, exactly. So our subject for this week, Lavrenti
Speaker 1: is born right in the middle of this kind of
Speaker 1: surge in socialist organizing in Georgia on March twenty ninth,
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety nine. So I believe he's an ares pisces
Speaker 1: cusp the worst.
Speaker 2: I don't know anything about signs. I just know whenever
Speaker 2: a sign is pronounced, the people that I know that
Speaker 2: are into them always just like cy heavily, like of
Speaker 2: course God, or that's exactly what he is.
Speaker 1: That's always by response whatever somebody brings up, like oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and this famous person is this sign. You roll your
Speaker 1: eyes and go, oh God, obviously whatever you just said.
Speaker 1: Becoming the head of the NKVD. What a pisces move,
Speaker 1: that's classic. It's right on the pisces. Yeah, the doing
Speaker 1: the Caden massacre, Katian massacre, that's a classic airy shit, right.
Speaker 1: Not surprised he's got vote in him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you wouldn't expect that from say, a cancer.
Speaker 1: Oh god, no, no, no, no, no, I'm sure one
Speaker 1: of the Nazis was a cancer. They anyway, Lavrenti Pavlovitch.
Speaker 1: Barria Is becomes a baby March twenty ninth, eighteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1: He's born in a small village, Merculi, which is kind
Speaker 1: of out in the boonies near the Black Sea coast.
Speaker 1: His family are Mingrelian, which is an ethnic minority in
Speaker 1: Georgia with its own language but not a written one,
Speaker 1: so they use the Georgian language for writing, but they've
Speaker 1: also got their own language. That's kind of just an
Speaker 1: oral tradition. The fact that he's Mingrellian is going to
Speaker 1: become relevant much later near the end of his life
Speaker 1: because Mingrellians are different, right, They're not the same as
Speaker 1: everyone else in Georgia. And in the late stalin Is period,
Speaker 1: anyone who's part of an ethnic group that isn't Russian
Speaker 1: or mainstream Georgian is gonna have a bad time.
Speaker 2: Right unfortunately, still kind of currently true.
Speaker 1: Well, still, this is if you know one period in
Speaker 1: Russian history, there's some broad strokes you'll be accurate about
Speaker 1: in most of it, right. So Barrias Georgia was considered
Speaker 1: by Western Europeans to be among the most backwards parts
Speaker 1: of the continent. One visitor in eighteen ninety one from
Speaker 1: Germany claimed they didn't even know about crop rotation, which
Speaker 1: might speak more to his racism than actual agricultural practice.
Speaker 1: But it's undeniable that this was seen as the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere in most people's eyes, and as a result,
Speaker 1: it's much more culturally isolated than most parts of the
Speaker 1: Western Russian Empire. It's not a very cosmopolitan place. Barrya's mother,
Speaker 1: Marta Ivanova, was twenty seven when she had him, which
Speaker 1: is pretty late in that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, surprising. I was expecting you to say fourteen or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, I mean, she'd had some
Speaker 1: other kids, I think before. And she is described by
Speaker 1: barry a biographer Amy Knight as a quote simple, deeply
Speaker 1: religious woman who attended church regularly all her life. Some sources,
Speaker 1: including Knight's biography, claim she came from a noble background,
Speaker 1: although it was a branch of the nobility that had
Speaker 1: no money. Another biographer, I read a guy named Sangster,
Speaker 1: and a couple other people have come into argue that
Speaker 1: he was probably had no noble blood. It was kind
Speaker 1: of a rumor, might have been like a family legend.
Speaker 1: We've got this ancestry, but there's not evidence of it.
Speaker 1: But a lot of this comes down to like family
Speaker 1: law as opposed to something that likes.
Speaker 2: It's very much a Caucasian thing to have, like deep
Speaker 2: family lore that is not at all grounded in reality,
Speaker 2: Like he started as like her great great uncle once
Speaker 2: removed story and then like spreads throughout your family till
Speaker 2: it's just spoken as just unassailable fact.
Speaker 1: And it's tough because part of it there's probably almost
Speaker 1: certainly everyone has some noble ancestry because nobles fuck a
Speaker 1: lot of their servants and have a lot of illegitimate children.
Speaker 1: Like Stalin is going to be taken care of by
Speaker 1: this rich guy his mom worked for, right, Like he's
Speaker 1: this rich guy's gonna give them a lot of money,
Speaker 1: and Barry, his mom's gonna have the same situation. And
Speaker 1: we don't know, Well, was it just because she worked
Speaker 1: for this guy he considered her part of the family,
Speaker 1: so he helped out. Is it because they were stopping?
Speaker 1: Is it because there's like that he had an illegitimate
Speaker 1: kid with her, right, Like we will never know.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe she's working the whole time. You know,
Speaker 2: maybe she's working.
Speaker 1: The whole time, right, Maybe she's got a little that
Speaker 1: in Nancy Reagan magic. Nothing against that, you.
Speaker 2: Know, Barry a family, the mcgrellian throat goats.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting to note that a lot of Marxist
Speaker 1: rebel lee like Marxist leaders, because all Marxists are kind
Speaker 1: of members of an illegal party in this period, whether
Speaker 1: you're kind of more in the Menshevik or the Bolshevik side,
Speaker 1: the Tsar doesn't like what you're doing. Most of the
Speaker 1: leaders of these Marxist organizations have a background where there's
Speaker 1: some nobility. A lot of them come from the cashless nobility,
Speaker 1: which is like a big thing all throughout Europe. You've
Speaker 1: got like your nobles who are rich, and you've got
Speaker 1: your nobles who squandered everything. So they've got the blood
Speaker 1: but nothing else. I know, the the ones I respect more, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: And a lot of leftist leaders in this period, particularly
Speaker 1: if youth organizations, are these like cashless nobles, and it
Speaker 1: makes sense because they they tend to benefit from much
Speaker 1: more of an education. But they're not really even though
Speaker 1: they're nobles, they're not really the same class as the
Speaker 1: people with money because they don't have any fucking money.
Speaker 1: So it's not hard to see, right, like why that
Speaker 1: would be the case. MARTA's got a pretty difficult life.
Speaker 1: Her first marriage gives her one son, who dies young.
Speaker 1: Her husband dies too, so she marries again. She has
Speaker 1: three more kids, one of them, Anna, is born deaf mute,
Speaker 1: another who is Barry, his brother we know nothing about,
Speaker 1: so he probably died young too. And then she's got Barria,
Speaker 1: who's the only boy we know survived to adulthood. And
Speaker 1: by the way, her second marriage with Barry his dad
Speaker 1: in the same way as the first, and that her
Speaker 1: husband dies the Barry of family husbands have a proud
Speaker 1: tradition of dying instantly after making kids.
Speaker 2: We don't know if Laventi had something to do with
Speaker 2: any of this.
Speaker 1: It's not a zero percent chance, right.
Speaker 2: If someone told me, like, you know, when he was
Speaker 2: barely able to walk, he sank a knife into someone's neck,
Speaker 2: I'd be like, yeah, cross.
Speaker 1: You hear a lot about like, yeah, you know, this
Speaker 1: kid killed his mom and childbirth or whatever. Right, common story.
Speaker 1: Barria pops out with a knife and shanks his dad.
Speaker 2: Right in the gut. I mean, from my own family history,
Speaker 2: you know what, I'm okay with this.
Speaker 1: So Barry is going to be the only boy to
Speaker 1: make it to adulthood. And it's probably not surprising that
Speaker 1: Marta dobts on him, right. He is a mama's boy.
Speaker 1: Stalin is as well. And another thing I've noticed when
Speaker 1: you read about a lot of the more influential like
Speaker 1: rebel leaders in Russia in this period, decent number of
Speaker 1: them are mom as boys, you know.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: So if you want your kid to overthrow the government,
Speaker 1: spoil them a little bit, moms, you know, it's good
Speaker 1: for him.
Speaker 2: Rama's boy grown up. So I guess I'm just waiting
Speaker 2: for my time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, no, don't let the uh, don't let
Speaker 1: the immigration board hear that.
Speaker 2: I already got my residency cars.
Speaker 1: So one of his peers later recalled that he quote
Speaker 1: grew up on the hands of his mother, who earned
Speaker 1: by her sewing. So that's kind of how she keeps
Speaker 1: the lights on, although the lights are not like electric lights,
Speaker 1: so she actually keeps the lights on by it. It's
Speaker 1: how you buy the candles, yeah, buying candles.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So here's how Night describes Laventi as an adolescent in
Speaker 1: the book, Barria, Stalin's first lieutenant. Barria was a mediocre student,
Speaker 1: not excelling in any subject but considered cunning and devious.
Speaker 1: After completing school and Sukumi in nineteen fifteen, Barria went
Speaker 1: to the city of Baku, in a Zerbajan, where he
Speaker 1: enrolled in the Baku Polytechnical School for Mechanical Construction, remaining
Speaker 1: there for the next four years. Baria probably chose Baku
Speaker 1: for his studies instead of Tabilisi, which was much closer
Speaker 1: to home, because it offered the specific course he was
Speaker 1: interested in. Nonetheless, Baku was almost six hundred kilometers from home,
Speaker 1: quite a distance for a boy of only sixteen. Barria
Speaker 1: says in his autobiography that he supported himself, his mother,
Speaker 1: his sister, and young niece by doing office work during
Speaker 1: school vacations. Now, these claims that Barria is a shitty student,
Speaker 1: but you know, supports his family and somehow gets into
Speaker 1: Baku Polytechnic are primarily supported by a family friend and
Speaker 1: later comrade in the USSR government named Danilov. And Danilov
Speaker 1: is the guy who's like, yeah, he wasn't book smart,
Speaker 1: he was a shitty student, but he's just cunning. We
Speaker 1: get a different version of what happened in a summary
Speaker 1: of Barria I found on globalsecurity dot Org, which is
Speaker 1: a think tank founded in two thousand that focuses on
Speaker 1: defense and foreign policy. Bob Woodward likes them. I don't
Speaker 1: know much more about them beyond that, but they seem
Speaker 1: to be relatively credible, and this scans with some other
Speaker 1: things I've read. In school, Barria did very well as
Speaker 1: the best student the villager's pride. He went to study
Speaker 1: in Sukumi. Apparently they always moved in vain desire to advance,
Speaker 1: to be the first in any cost. And this is
Speaker 1: kind of a discrepancy. You'll get like Barry is either
Speaker 1: this shitty student who's super cunning and gets by on
Speaker 1: being a schemer, or he's a pretty good student who's
Speaker 1: like really well respected in town because he's this local
Speaker 1: boy who does well. The fact that there are discrepancies
Speaker 1: in this and almost every other fact about the man
Speaker 1: comes down to the fact that most of what we
Speaker 1: know about Barria comes from either coworkers who later helped
Speaker 1: to murder him and thus wanted to make him look bad,
Speaker 1: or his own cult of personality right, which is also
Speaker 1: full of shit. So it is really hard to know
Speaker 1: much for certain about, particularly his early life. Polish writer
Speaker 1: Thaddeus Whitlan an early Barria biographer even called Barria the
Speaker 1: man without history. Of course, Andrew Sankster notes, he then
Speaker 1: spends pages on his early life, how he dressed, and
Speaker 1: even his thought processes, how he behaved in school, and
Speaker 1: from this the reader can only assume it is mere conjecture.
Speaker 1: So again, like, there's so much bullshit about this guy,
Speaker 1: even in the pretty good biographies. And I'm not shitting
Speaker 1: on night here. I think her book is generally quite good,
Speaker 1: but like there's just a lot of maybees with Barry.
Speaker 2: That's like, you know, kind of part and parcel with
Speaker 2: a guy like Barrier, right, yes, yes, he when he
Speaker 2: comes to power, he's known for being terrifying, which you know,
Speaker 2: obviously we'll get to and one of the most terrifying
Speaker 2: things you can do, and something that he had the
Speaker 2: power to do was erase his own history. Then you
Speaker 2: can't use it against them, right, And that's a part
Speaker 2: of it. And also one thing Sangster will note is
Speaker 2: that most early Barrier biographies are written after his execution
Speaker 2: when he becomes so Stalin dies they kill Barria and
Speaker 2: guys like Krushchev comes into power next, and Krushchev and
Speaker 2: everyone who kind of survives from the Stalinist era. They're
Speaker 2: all complicit in the crimes of the Stalinist era, and
Speaker 2: they all I want to blame everything that went bad
Speaker 2: in that period on Barria because it's it really works
Speaker 2: out well for them. So the books about him in
Speaker 2: this period are basically just novels with Barria as the villain,
Speaker 2: and he was a villain. But that doesn't mean everything
Speaker 2: in those novels is true, right, Yeah, For his part,
Speaker 2: Sangster agrees that Barria was actually probably a really good student,
Speaker 2: and I kind of think he's right about this because
Speaker 2: from what I've read, Baku Polytechnic's a pretty competitive school
Speaker 2: and it's not super common for kids like Baria from
Speaker 2: poor villages to go there if they're not really good students,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, I mean, far be it for me
Speaker 2: to say anything positive about the city of Baku. But
Speaker 2: everything written about the Polytechnic is very, very good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I've never heard it as like, you know, it's not
Speaker 2: a schlup school or anything like that, and especially being
Speaker 2: from a village, being from a cashlest noble family or
Speaker 2: just maybe a regular poor family, whichever family, Yeah, you
Speaker 2: had to show some kind of promise in order to
Speaker 2: get in it, and they're not going to allow some
Speaker 2: mass who's coasting by on mediocre grades. But is quote
Speaker 2: unquote cunning. You can cunning on standardized testing.
Speaker 1: Yeah maybe if he was getting like an English degree
Speaker 1: where bullshitting was part. But he's like an architecture, right,
Speaker 1: you presume he had to show some promise.
Speaker 2: It's always the architects, Robert, you.
Speaker 1: Can't never Look, I've been saying this for years, Joe.
Speaker 1: We have to kill all the architects, you know, and
Speaker 1: I know that's half of our listeners. We're huge among architects,
Speaker 1: but you're all, you're all the death of this world.
Speaker 2: And you can't trust them. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2: It's a lot like horses. I don't know what it is. Yeah,
Speaker 2: don't trust them.
Speaker 1: No horses, no architects. That's the new that's the new
Speaker 1: anarchist flag. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to get people
Speaker 1: to adopt.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: But if you hate architects, you know who's working to
Speaker 1: destroy them all and end all laws about how you
Speaker 1: can and can't build a house are sponsors. So buy
Speaker 1: from them and help them lobby Congress to make it
Speaker 1: legal to do your own electrical work, you know, say
Speaker 1: we're back and I just in the break rewired my
Speaker 1: entire home. I've I've found out that if you don't
Speaker 1: put that plastic coat around the wires, it really cuts
Speaker 1: down on the weight, you know, of your house, which
Speaker 1: is helpful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now I have nothing but mail to mail plugs,
Speaker 2: like the suicide plugs holding all together. I'm really happy
Speaker 2: that they ponied up the money to get like, you know,
Speaker 2: awareness out there for Rube goldberg S ways to kill
Speaker 2: yourself of electricity. I'm all on board for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's let's let's actually, Sophie, can we get a
Speaker 1: sponsorship from the people who make those mail to mail
Speaker 1: plugs on Amazon that burn down your house and kill
Speaker 1: your family?
Speaker 2: I think that's for them.
Speaker 3: Probably not.
Speaker 2: I would just assume.
Speaker 1: No, buy him anyway, folks, They're probably safe. It's speaking
Speaker 1: of product to buy once. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Barrier would
Speaker 1: have liked them. He liked killing people. So there's a
Speaker 1: weird mentioned by one of the first Soviets to chronicle
Speaker 1: Barrier's life, that he and his family were supported by
Speaker 1: cash gifts from a wealthy noble that his mom worked
Speaker 1: as a servant for kind of again makes me wonder
Speaker 1: if she was maybe getting some strange There are rumors
Speaker 1: that actually Baria might be this guy's son. It's plausible,
Speaker 1: but you get this like literally the same thing happened
Speaker 1: with Stalin. So I think the fact is just this
Speaker 1: is not a really uncommon social relationship. Like if your
Speaker 1: mom was hot in rural Georgia, she probably had like
Speaker 1: a wealthy patron, right, and why not. It's hard to
Speaker 1: get by back then. You know your husband's gonna die
Speaker 1: three times in your life. You need money from somewhere.
Speaker 2: I mean, what are your options, right, You're a penniless
Speaker 2: dirt farmer, or you let some like rich guy clap
Speaker 2: them cheeks for like fifteen seconds every two weeks. Who
Speaker 2: wouldn't Who wouldn't signed me up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm on board. I'm well, no, actually, you
Speaker 1: and I are both dying at age nineteen after fathering
Speaker 1: our fifth child.
Speaker 2: In the climate.
Speaker 1: So when Barrio was five or six, Russia gets convulsed
Speaker 1: by revolution for the first time in his life. We
Speaker 1: know now that this was the prelude to the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventeen Revolution, but at the time a lot of people
Speaker 1: would have seen the complete and devastating crackdown by the
Speaker 1: Tsar as evidence that the regime was pretty strong. Right,
Speaker 1: you get this this, this does not go well and
Speaker 1: the Tsar kills so many fucking people. Now in those
Speaker 1: days again, the left wing opponents of the Tsari system
Speaker 1: are Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks are a tightly centralized
Speaker 1: party led by Lenin, who is not in country for
Speaker 1: a lot of this period, and they want a one
Speaker 1: party right, he's in Germany for a spell. I think
Speaker 1: he moves around a bit. I'm not an expert on
Speaker 1: his whole movements, but he's he's out of the he's
Speaker 1: out of the country leading from Afar for most of
Speaker 1: Barrie's early life, and the Bolsheviks are very centralized. They
Speaker 1: are a one party state that wants one party control
Speaker 1: of a proletarian dictatorship. Right, that's the whole idea. The
Speaker 1: Mensheviks are again, closer to social demo and as a result,
Speaker 1: are more popular for most of Barry's childhood because most
Speaker 1: people generally prefer not one party rule to one party rule.
Speaker 1: That does change rapidly at points.
Speaker 2: But whenever anybody throws around a term like dictatorship. It's
Speaker 2: to turn off.
Speaker 1: I'm not on board. I'm not generally on board. Now
Speaker 1: in this case, you can debate, like, if your choice
Speaker 1: is dictatorship of the proletariat to the czar, don't I
Speaker 1: don't think you're wrong in saying like, well, let's try anything,
Speaker 1: but having a fucking czar.
Speaker 2: I get it. You know, if I was ruled by
Speaker 2: Zar Nicholas, I would accept anything that is not to Zarna.
Speaker 1: Anything that's not Theizar. It makes sense to me, logical step.
Speaker 1: From the age of sixteen on, Barry is going to
Speaker 1: be his mother's primary means of financial support, which means
Speaker 1: that he's able to when he moves to Baku. Kind
Speaker 1: Of one of the things he does he gets involved
Speaker 1: in socialist organizing and one of his jobs for the
Speaker 1: student organization he's in. Because he's working full time, he
Speaker 1: has a lot of connections with workers that are also
Speaker 1: organized in different Marxist like unions and stuff, and he's
Speaker 1: able to make connections between the student group that he's
Speaker 1: ad at the college and these like laborers who are
Speaker 1: not super educated. Right, So that's kind of his earliest
Speaker 1: job as a not even quite a revolutionary but certainly
Speaker 1: an activist at this.
Speaker 2: Stage, more just like your run of the mill organizer
Speaker 2: at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now to note though, there is a revolutionary aspect
Speaker 1: to even being run of the mill as an organizer,
Speaker 1: because this is still treason, right, like, this is illegal,
Speaker 1: you know, light treason, you might call it, but treason.
Speaker 2: Nonetheless, you're still going to get a visit by some
Speaker 2: dudes who are going to drag you into a dark basement,
Speaker 2: right right, the Okrana is not going to be thrilled
Speaker 2: with what you're getting up to. And by the time
Speaker 2: the big dub dub uno is underway, that's World War One.
Speaker 2: Everyone hates it when I when I use those terms
Speaker 2: for them, I gotta say, I'm not a fan.
Speaker 1: Not No, nobody likes it. I don't like it, but
Speaker 1: I'm doing it much like having a czar. It's it's
Speaker 1: just one of those things that can't change until there's
Speaker 1: a bloody revolution, so you know, I.
Speaker 2: Guess or.
Speaker 1: Anyway, So by the time World War One starts, he's
Speaker 1: sixteen or so, and he and several fellow students set
Speaker 1: up in a legal study circle, pouring over the works
Speaker 1: of Marxist theory. Baria is treasurer of the group, and
Speaker 1: in March of nineteen seventeen he joins the Bolshevik Party.
Speaker 1: Now this only happens, he only becomes a Bolshevik after
Speaker 1: the revolution gets that czar out of their hair, right
Speaker 1: they wash him out. And prior to that point, Baria
Speaker 1: is into again radical politics, but we don't have any
Speaker 1: evidence of him participating in like armed revolutionary activity. So
Speaker 1: right after he joins the Bolshevik Party, he gets conscripted
Speaker 1: into the army and he's sent to the Romanian Front
Speaker 1: to serve as essentially a combat engineer, right, I think
Speaker 1: he's actually doing like hydraulic shit, probably to make sure
Speaker 1: that troops have water, is as best as I can
Speaker 1: term it.
Speaker 2: Make sure this water only has the minimum amount of
Speaker 2: colra necessary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't what too little cholera, right,
Speaker 1: Like you know, a growing soldier needs some cholera.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes it strong, like one of those things.
Speaker 2: It's like, there's so many episodes in that arc that
Speaker 2: would make the world a much better place. If a
Speaker 2: bullet sailed just like five centimeters to the left of
Speaker 2: the right.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, there's that sad, sad story about that
Speaker 1: British sniper who has Hitler in his sights, and we
Speaker 1: know this is true because like he remembered it, and
Speaker 1: Hitler's like, yeah, I saw this guy get a beat
Speaker 1: on me and the brit The brit was like, well,
Speaker 1: the fighting was basically over. They were in retreat, and
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't want one more boy to
Speaker 1: die today. And you can't blame a man for doing that, but.
Speaker 2: Motherfucker must have kicked his own ass harder than anyone else.
Speaker 1: It's one of those moments from history. It's like, what
Speaker 1: is the lesson here? Kill more teenagers?
Speaker 2: Like never take mercy on your enemies because one of
Speaker 2: them might be Hitler.
Speaker 1: It's like that woman who like stops Hitler from committing
Speaker 1: suicide by trying to like talk him out of it.
Speaker 1: And it's like, yeah, what what do you get from this?
Speaker 1: Like where do you?
Speaker 2: Where do we? Where do we truide? Hitler puts her
Speaker 2: arm rounders, like have you heard of betterhelp?
Speaker 1: Don't learn lessons from history people, That's the primary lesson
Speaker 1: of this podcast. Ignore everything I say and get on
Speaker 1: with your life.
Speaker 2: Especially if you got a motherfucker at your crossairs and
Speaker 2: he has a weird little mustache. You have no choice.
Speaker 1: Shoot anyone with a mustache. That's that's really the lesson.
Speaker 1: So by this point, when Barria gets sent to the
Speaker 1: Romanian Front, Russia is you know, the Czar is no
Speaker 1: longer in power, and the government that replaces it is
Speaker 1: essentially democratic, right, this the Bolsheviks are not in charge yet.
Speaker 1: This is not the USSR. It's kind of a socialist
Speaker 1: democratic state. It's not a very functional socialist democratic state, right,
Speaker 1: which is right? Yeah, And this is the Caucuses, so
Speaker 1: things are even like a little messier. But this ailing
Speaker 1: new democracy is still fighting the Tsar's war, right, which
Speaker 1: is a bad call. There's they probably should have done something. Besides,
Speaker 1: it's continuing to fight World War One. It seems like
Speaker 1: a like a like an easy uh self, like an
Speaker 1: easy own goal. It's like, you know, it's really unpopular
Speaker 1: or that drove revolution. I have I have an idea.
Speaker 1: What if he keeps doing it? Yeah, let's keep throwing
Speaker 1: down with the Germans.
Speaker 2: If we beat him at another generation of our men
Speaker 2: into a grinder to make some kind of multi ethnic mush.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, great, great call. So it doesn't go well, right,
Speaker 1: and there's going to be a Bolshevik revolution, and we're
Speaker 1: all familiar with kind of the broad terms of this,
Speaker 1: and this is when Barria kind of gets involved. Right
Speaker 1: during this this very chaotic period, he becomes the Bolshevik
Speaker 1: revolution party representative for his military unit, because all of
Speaker 1: the units have like effectively these unions, and his is
Speaker 1: a Bolshevik one. And when the war finally ends, he
Speaker 1: moves back to Baku, where the Bolsheviks are now ascendant,
Speaker 1: and the rest of his Aerbijan, I think it's still
Speaker 1: more Menshevik, but like Baku, the Bolsheviks are really starting
Speaker 1: to pick up a lot of steam. And he gets
Speaker 1: a position on the staff of the head of the
Speaker 1: Baku Soviet of Workers Deputies. Right, so he's he's it's
Speaker 1: kind of just because he's known as And this again
Speaker 1: makes me think those things about him not being a
Speaker 1: good student are not accurate. He keeps getting positions that
Speaker 1: are kind of high despite not having much experience, because
Speaker 1: the stuff he's doing is always like he's the treasurer,
Speaker 1: he's organizing, he's doing like bureaucratic shit because most people
Speaker 1: don't want to do that, and he's got that kind
Speaker 1: he's got that, he's got an organizer brain. Right, he's
Speaker 1: good at organizing, like like departments in shit, and he's
Speaker 1: willing to do that kind of boring but necessary work
Speaker 1: to lay the grounds to like actually have a large
Speaker 1: organization that does shit. And that's why he keeps getting
Speaker 1: put in positions because like most people want to do
Speaker 1: the sexy stuff, and Barry is like, I'll do the hard,
Speaker 1: bullshit paperwork stuff. It's not bullshit Like.
Speaker 2: That's that's the key to power is doing the stuff
Speaker 2: that nobody else wants to do and doing it well. Well.
Speaker 1: Again, I say this a lot. This is also the
Speaker 1: story if like Chochescu, if you overthrow the government and
Speaker 1: are running a revolutionary party and there's a quiet little
Speaker 1: dude who doesn't say much but he's always taking on
Speaker 1: bullshit work and you know, really helpful. Shoot that guy
Speaker 1: immediately immediately, you.
Speaker 2: Know, he volunteers to run the people's DMV. Take that
Speaker 2: motherfucker out back immediately.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. That man needs to end up in a
Speaker 1: fucking quiet little grave. So this was not an auspicious
Speaker 1: time to be helping to run the Baku Soviet because
Speaker 1: with Russia, you know, breaking out in revolution, a lot
Speaker 1: of people are like trying to take advantage of this,
Speaker 1: and one of the people trying to take advantage of
Speaker 1: this as a result of the war is Turkey, right,
Speaker 1: and Turkey's like, maybe we can have a little Azerabashan
Speaker 1: as a treat. So they invade and they wind up
Speaker 1: in charge of Baku for a little while in nineteen eighteen.
Speaker 1: They are not in power there long because spoiler after
Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen, the Ottoman Empire doesn't do great.
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't do very well, man, but they sure
Speaker 2: did a lot of damnfull they finally died. They shared it.
Speaker 1: They went out like they went out like heroes if
Speaker 1: heroes are constantly fucking up everything around. They went out
Speaker 1: like a dying empire. I guess it's probably better.
Speaker 2: To say so.
Speaker 1: Pretty soon, you know, the Turks are back out, and
Speaker 1: the Bolsheviks kind of wind up in quasi power. You know,
Speaker 1: they have a lot of power in the city. After
Speaker 1: the Turks leave, they're not in absolute power, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of fighting with another party for actual control of
Speaker 1: the city. Now, Baria, being young enough that he's not
Speaker 1: yet well known in politics, is picked to be a
Speaker 1: mole for this party, the Musabat party that are kind
Speaker 1: of have turned themselves into the primary opposition of the Bolsheviks,
Speaker 1: and they are to this day the oldest party in
Speaker 1: a Aerbijan. Still they're gonna They spend long periods of
Speaker 1: time kicked out of the area, exiled, a lot of
Speaker 1: their people get killed, but they still do exist. And
Speaker 1: Baria being you know, a pretty young guy, and being
Speaker 1: this dude who he's had some prominent roles, He's got
Speaker 1: some trust in the Bolsheviks, but he's also not a
Speaker 1: face man, right Like, he's somebody that is not super
Speaker 1: well known personally, is picked as a perfect mole to
Speaker 1: infiltrate the Musavut Party. And I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: that write up in Global Security. He worked as a
Speaker 1: clerk at the Caspian company White City, performed various assignments
Speaker 1: trapped underground. In the fall of nineteen nineteen, Berria joined
Speaker 1: the counterintelligence of the Committee of National Defense of the
Speaker 1: Azerbaijan Republic. Subsequently, this period of Barrie's life caused a
Speaker 1: lot of rumors. It was said that he consciously worked
Speaker 1: on the Azerbaijani nationalists and even was an agent of
Speaker 1: the British And you'll basically get claims that he was
Speaker 1: working every side of like the political conflicts in azerba
Speaker 1: Jan in this period. He's some people will say he
Speaker 1: was actually a Musavut agent, like spying on the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 1: He was a Bolsheviks spying on the Musavuts.
Speaker 2: He was like.
Speaker 1: Spying for the British on everybody. There's no real evidence
Speaker 1: for most of that. I think the likeliest thing here
Speaker 1: is that he is spying for the Bolsheviks on the
Speaker 1: Musavut party.
Speaker 2: I do love that a Georgian guy is like a
Speaker 2: hardline as Azerbaijani nationalist.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, he's like he's going hard for that, which
Speaker 1: like spoilery, he's not at all in the Zerban nationalist
Speaker 1: He is going to kill a lot of Zerbashani nationalists
Speaker 1: along with a lot of Armenian and Georgian nationalists. That's
Speaker 1: going to be his first real big gig for the
Speaker 1: US is what's happens.
Speaker 2: When you give someone from the Caucas's power over the Caucases. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because nobody hates us more than we hate ourselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah again, much like Texans exactly. So if you read
Speaker 1: more casual articles about Barria, they will all note that
Speaker 1: he's a member of this anti Bolshevik Musavat Party and
Speaker 1: calling them anti Bolshevik is like not entire It's close
Speaker 1: enough if you're getting like a broad summary of what's
Speaker 1: going on there. But I think Amy Knight's biography does
Speaker 1: a better job of contextualizing who these folks were and
Speaker 1: what Burya did with them. Quote. The Musabat Party had
Speaker 1: originally been formed in nineteen eleven to nineteen twelve by
Speaker 1: a group of intellectuals associated with the RSDRP. It later
Speaker 1: shifted ideologically to the right and became the party of
Speaker 1: the Rising a Zherbashani bourgeoisie. After a period of cooperation
Speaker 1: with the Bolsheviks and Baku, during which they supported the
Speaker 1: Soviet the Musivitists increasingly opposed Bolshevik policies by late nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 1: In early nineteen eighteen, they had become the Bolsheviks' most
Speaker 1: formidable rivals. In the autumn of nineteen nineteen, Berry was
Speaker 1: assigned by the Bolsheviks to conduct counterintelligence within the ruling
Speaker 1: Musovak government. So you have this party that is it
Speaker 1: starts as an intellectual party that's pretty left wing, but
Speaker 1: like social democrat right, and they're willing to work with
Speaker 1: the Bolsheviks and Baku for a period of time when
Speaker 1: kind of in the most chaotic post revolutionary period. But
Speaker 1: as the Bolsheviks start to gain power and it becomes
Speaker 1: clear that they are not willing to compromise or share
Speaker 1: power with anyone else, the Musivitists, in part because they
Speaker 1: represent a lot of people in the bougeoisie, but also
Speaker 1: because they just aren't a one party state, increasingly reformed
Speaker 1: themselves as an opposition party to the Bolsheviks, right, And
Speaker 1: that's kind of what happens here. And again you can
Speaker 1: find sources who say Barry is working with them legitimately,
Speaker 1: and that wouldn't be so weird because he's an opportunist
Speaker 1: and they are in power for a period of time,
Speaker 1: so it's not impossible that he is. He's doing both that,
Speaker 1: like he's really trying to hedge his bets here. He's
Speaker 1: feeding some information to the Bolsheviks in case the Bolshoviks win,
Speaker 1: but he's also trying to help the Mucivitists because maybe
Speaker 1: they're going to win. And Barria is this kind of
Speaker 1: like wherever the wind blows is kind of where I'm
Speaker 1: going to try to make, you know, a place for
Speaker 1: myself right.
Speaker 2: A few days old have now he would just work
Speaker 2: for like the Young Turks Network or something. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: that audience Capri failed, you just go work for Ben Shapiro.
Speaker 1: You know, he is one of these guys who like
Speaker 1: would absolutely have made a hard right turn if that
Speaker 1: had been the way to gain power, right. But the
Speaker 1: Whites are never really like, I know, there's ever a
Speaker 1: period where they're like winning well enough where he is
Speaker 1: that he would have considered that right, But it does
Speaker 1: kind of look like they're superiod where he's willing to
Speaker 1: make maybe make his peace with the Musavits, you know,
Speaker 1: if that's going to be who winds up in power.
Speaker 1: But you know, we don't really know. And certainly the
Speaker 1: Bolsheviks believe that he is legitimately spying on the Mucivitists
Speaker 1: for them, right, And this is going to become a
Speaker 1: problem for Barria right away because while he's going to
Speaker 1: get a bunch of other gigs spying, you know, back
Speaker 1: in Georgia, the Bolsheviks are going to keep using him
Speaker 1: as a spy. In like nineteen twenty, not long after
Speaker 1: this period, after the Bolsheviks win, he's going to be
Speaker 1: tried by the Central Committee in his Aerbuzhan for being
Speaker 1: a mucivitist spy, and the case is resolved in his favor.
Speaker 1: But every time he gets in trouble within the party,
Speaker 1: the allegations come back up because it's the easiest way
Speaker 1: to like fuck with him, right, is to point out that, like,
Speaker 1: well you did this at one point, we don't really
Speaker 1: know whose side you were on.
Speaker 2: That's a good example of like how he becomes the
Speaker 2: guy he is because he got picked as a spy
Speaker 2: being disloyal or whatever, goes to trial, gets away with that,
Speaker 2: he's like in the future, he's like, well, that's never
Speaker 2: gonna have again.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, one thing that definitely suggests he was a
Speaker 1: legitimate spy for the Bolsheviks is again they keep using
Speaker 1: him as one. And after the Bolsheviks kind of gain
Speaker 1: the upper hand in Baku, he gets sent back home
Speaker 1: to Georgia to do some spying, right, And in Georgia,
Speaker 1: into Blisi, the Mensheviks are in charge, right, they are
Speaker 1: the dominant party when he gets sent there, and the
Speaker 1: Bolsheviks are not cool with this, so they have guys
Speaker 1: like Baria go among the peasants to try to prod
Speaker 1: them into maybe overthrowing the government again and seeing if
Speaker 1: that works out better for everybody. So Baria moves to Tablizi,
Speaker 1: where he constructs his very first spying network. And Joe,
Speaker 1: do you remember when you constructed your first spying network
Speaker 1: to overthrow the government in power?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: I was but a young boy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You make a lot of mistakes, right,
Speaker 1: We all make a lot of mistakes when we're overthrowing
Speaker 1: a political party. You know, it happens, and that's gonna
Speaker 1: this is a messy period for Baria. I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from Knight's biography here. Not surprisingly, he was soon arrested
Speaker 1: along with the entire Bolsheviks Central Committee in Georgia. Thanks
Speaker 1: to the efforts of the Georgian Bolshevik Georgi Sturia, Baria
Speaker 1: was freed on the condition that he leave Georgia within
Speaker 1: three days, but he remained adopting the false name Lakerbea
Speaker 1: and working in the Russian embassy. So he makes this
Speaker 1: promise to leave, and then instead of leaving, he flees
Speaker 1: to the embassy and he gets right back to working
Speaker 1: as a spy to try to because this is the
Speaker 1: Russian embassy and the Russian government is controlled by the
Speaker 1: Bolsheviks at this point. I know, there's this is a
Speaker 1: very messy period of time, right, this would have been
Speaker 1: what the first Georgian Republic period, so right, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so he is hiding out in the Russian embassy
Speaker 1: because that is a Bolshevik embassy, and still continuing to
Speaker 1: work to try to overthrow the Mensheviks in Georgia, and
Speaker 1: kind of right around this time, the Russian government concludes
Speaker 1: a treaty with Georgia, but like most treaties between Russia
Speaker 1: and a neighbor, it's more of a wink by the
Speaker 1: Russians than a promise. The Mensheviks take their side of
Speaker 1: the treaty seriously, though, and they free all of the
Speaker 1: imprisoned Bolsheviks that who had just tried to overthrow the government,
Speaker 1: and they even make it legal for the Bolsheviks to
Speaker 1: have meetings and publish newspapers. Again, the Mensheviks are really
Speaker 1: this is again another lesson, don't give anyone the benefit
Speaker 1: of the doubt in a revolution.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, someone tries to overthrow the government, maybe
Speaker 2: you like keep him.
Speaker 1: In prison, right, yes, maybe this is relevant in the
Speaker 1: United States.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I've never read anything about our recent history. So when
Speaker 1: the latest Bolshevik plot to take power is revealed, because
Speaker 1: they try again, Barya gets arrested again and he goes
Speaker 1: on a hunger strike, but it's like one of those
Speaker 1: he skips dinner hunger strikes, you know, it doesn't last
Speaker 1: very long, and he gets sent out of Georgia on
Speaker 1: a prison convoy. By August, he's back in a Zerbashan
Speaker 1: and he gets back to being a student. He kind
Speaker 1: of goes back to school for a while, and he
Speaker 1: catches a side gig for the Bolsheviks, who at this
Speaker 1: point are doing very well in Baku. But Lenin has
Speaker 1: demanded at this point that Zerbazhan be brought over into
Speaker 1: what's becoming the USSR wholesale and the Bolsheviks in Baku
Speaker 1: start a serious effort to do just that. It's possible
Speaker 1: that this is when Baria meets Stalin for the first time,
Speaker 1: because Stalin is part of this effort that Lennon's pushing.
Speaker 1: Gives a speech in Baku in November of nineteen twenty.
Speaker 1: Now at this time, bury a specific job is Executive
Speaker 1: Secretary of the Extraordinary Commission for the Expropriation of the
Speaker 1: bourgeoisie and the improvement of working life. And they love titles,
Speaker 1: They fucking love titles. That's too long for a job title, right,
Speaker 1: And what that job actually is is he's taking shit
Speaker 1: from like rich people in middle class people and theoretically
Speaker 1: splitting it up among the working class. Now, how much
Speaker 1: of that gets split up and how much of that
Speaker 1: gets lost to rampant corruption? Well, it's a zherbash yet
Speaker 1: you know thinks so.
Speaker 2: That has changed. Let's be fair.
Speaker 1: It's the Caucasus, right, it's heastern Europe again.
Speaker 2: Thankfully, this no longer happens.
Speaker 1: It's a place populated by humans, so a lot of
Speaker 1: it disappears into corruption. The Night Rights of this period
Speaker 1: in his life, this organization was charged with forcibly seizing
Speaker 1: property on behalf of the Bolsheviks rather unsavory business, and
Speaker 1: Baria again was doing the paperwork. When the commission was
Speaker 1: abolished in February nineteen twenty one, Beria took the opportunity
Speaker 1: to persuade the Central Committee to support him in his
Speaker 1: studies as an architect builder. He received a stipend from
Speaker 1: the Baku Soviet, but only after a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: the Central Committee made him abandon his studies to work
Speaker 1: in the Azerbaijan political police, the infamous Cheka. And this
Speaker 1: is when he becomes a secret policeman. And that's what
Speaker 1: we're going to get to after this next ad break.
Speaker 1: So be the secret police in your life and arrest
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Speaker 3: Cop. Don't tell people to be cops.
Speaker 1: But cops of products, Sophie.
Speaker 2: Is it a cop or is it a spy or
Speaker 2: is it both? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Both, spy on these products. Whatever it takes to get
Speaker 1: them into your home. You know, that's what we believe.
Speaker 3: Don't listen to him.
Speaker 2: We're back.
Speaker 1: So the Cheka are the secret police in Georgia and
Speaker 1: the Jereberson and everywhere, right, and they're going to go
Speaker 1: through several This is what ends up the different checkas
Speaker 1: all eventually end up as the NKVD, right, which all
Speaker 1: eventually ends up as the KGB. You know, this is
Speaker 1: like a process.
Speaker 2: Right. If there's one thing that Soviet Union likes more
Speaker 2: than titles, it's changing those titles arbitrary.
Speaker 1: God, so many, I'm going to call them the Cheka.
Speaker 1: For most of the period before like Barria is in
Speaker 1: Moscow and the USSR is fully settled, but they go
Speaker 1: through some different names, right, but it's generally everyone still
Speaker 1: generally calls them the Checka at various points because they're
Speaker 1: still the secret police, right, whatever titles they're picking. Right,
Speaker 1: this is the position where Barry is going to truly
Speaker 1: shine because the first big task the Bolsheviks need from
Speaker 1: him is to overthrow the Armenian government. Now, Joe, have
Speaker 1: you ever tried to overthrow the Armenian government?
Speaker 2: I cannot legally answer that question.
Speaker 1: It's a whole thing, right, it's this we gotta do stuff.
Speaker 2: Did I make it this long of life without knowing
Speaker 2: Barrier was involved in the overthrow of the first Median republics?
Speaker 1: Absolutely? Yeah, And of.
Speaker 2: Course he came from Azerbaijan to do it, God damn it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well at this point he's coming in from Georgia, but
Speaker 1: through but through Baku. Right there in the.
Speaker 2: Mix, they're in the mix there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's clear. So there's a lot that you have
Speaker 1: to do to overthrow the first Armenian Republic, and Barria,
Speaker 1: along with several of his colleagues, put together different plans
Speaker 1: for how they might make this happen. Right, And it's
Speaker 1: one of those things where like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: like different pitches, and Barrias is kind of the one
Speaker 1: that winds up being the the kind of basis for
Speaker 1: the plan they eventually And I've been.
Speaker 2: In a lot of writers room and I feel like
Speaker 2: a writer's room with Lavrenti Berry would be the worst
Speaker 2: one ever. It is.
Speaker 1: It's a terrible writer's room. He's always suggesting fucking bottle episodes.
Speaker 1: So Barrya's boss is a guy named Mirkafar Bagarov. He's
Speaker 1: just a twenty four year old who's in head of
Speaker 1: the Baku Cheka. He's got a reputation for brutality, and
Speaker 1: he likes Baria because Barrya is willing to do fucking anything.
Speaker 1: He is perfectly willing to get his hands dirty. So
Speaker 1: at twenty one, Barria gets promoted to be Bagarov's assistant.
Speaker 1: And this is, you know, the start of a fairly
Speaker 1: rapid series of promotions. Because people are killing and dying
Speaker 1: so rapidly, it's easy to move up if you're really
Speaker 1: willing to kill, you know. And it's interesting. Bagarov is
Speaker 1: kind of the only guy other than Stalin maybe that
Speaker 1: Barria ever works under without later overthrowing or killing. Right,
Speaker 1: This is like one of the very few people who
Speaker 1: is Barrya's boss that he does not murder or otherwise
Speaker 1: help to destroy.
Speaker 2: I wonder what the difference was, because it wouldn't be
Speaker 2: like dirt, like Barria was more than comfortable killing people
Speaker 2: who had dirt on him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think maybe truly friends.
Speaker 2: There's likes one friend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they might have just kind of been buds. And
Speaker 1: also I think it's that, like he knows Bagarov is
Speaker 1: never really rising above a certain level, so he doesn't
Speaker 1: need to write. He kind of can leap frog over
Speaker 1: him without fucking him. And it's useful to have a
Speaker 1: guy like Bagarov who like owes you a favor that
Speaker 1: you can, you know, trust. That's as much as.
Speaker 2: Barry It's more likely than Barria having an actual friend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well like his one buddy. Now. Andrew Sangster argues
Speaker 1: that Barria begins in the check a quote a lifelong
Speaker 1: habit of intrigue against his own superiors and the hope
Speaker 1: that he could destabilize them to his own advantage. His
Speaker 1: next boss, Ivan Pavlinowski, pleaded at staff meetings for his
Speaker 1: deputy Barria to cease intrigues against him. So like Dry
Speaker 1: please stop plotting to overthrow me to it.
Speaker 2: Joh, stop it, O god, it's a complaint to have
Speaker 2: in your employee record. Like I know personally, I have
Speaker 2: never been publicly told at like you know, like the
Speaker 2: firefighter's board or whatever by my captain to please stop
Speaker 2: plot against it.
Speaker 1: Please stop plotting my murder. You can't, you have to.
Speaker 1: You can't do this anymore. It is really funny.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Again, the death of Stalin not wildly accurate to the
Speaker 1: to the direct history. I do think it gets like
Speaker 1: the broad strokes of the relationships pretty well. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: the Armando Ynucci, the writer is also the guy who
Speaker 1: did a veep and he did a show that Veep
Speaker 1: is kind of based on that was based on UK politics.
Speaker 1: I always forget the name, and he's like, I want
Speaker 1: to see him do like a three season series about
Speaker 1: the early Soviet politics and the Caucuses, because you could
Speaker 1: make a wildly entertaining comedy about this. Like a lot
Speaker 1: of people die, but everyone is such a piece of shit.
Speaker 1: There's all so much backstabbing and overthrowing each other.
Speaker 2: A lot of fun, like a young Stalin treatment. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: like Coba.
Speaker 1: If you ever watched the there's a really good TV show,
Speaker 1: The Great, which is about Oh, it's wonderful. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: one of what's her name, the great, uh fucking Catherine, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the who's who's a czar Zarita Zarza. I always forget
Speaker 1: the proper term when it's the woman, but she's fully
Speaker 1: in charge and Zorena anyway, Zarena. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that show gets really well and again wildly inaccurate
Speaker 1: to the literal like steps of history, but it gets
Speaker 1: really well the kind of constant backstabbing and like overthrowing
Speaker 1: and shit in that that's a long time hallmark of
Speaker 1: Russian politics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and to its credit, it never even attempts to
Speaker 2: be accurate and even says like this is not accurate
Speaker 2: in like the ticker before the show starts every episode.
Speaker 2: It's still fucking wonderful.
Speaker 1: It's fun, it's got got some got some great performances
Speaker 1: by h Nicholas Holt, one of my favorite actors. Good
Speaker 1: ship check it out, three real solid seasons. So Barria
Speaker 1: is going to prove no less brutal to his colleagues
Speaker 1: than he is to the citizens of a Zerabash and
Speaker 1: Georgia and Armenia. Sangster writes, quote. The Czecka's main task
Speaker 1: was to crush any counter revolutionary group, which was interpreted
Speaker 1: with the whitest possible guidelines. It was a time of
Speaker 1: festering chaos, distrust, in sheer brutality. In nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 1: the Troika system was announced, which was a three man
Speaker 1: committee empowered to judge and execute on the spot, and
Speaker 1: Barria played a major role in such proceedings. In his
Speaker 1: area of responsibility in his very early twenties, he had
Speaker 1: become accustomed to having people killed, not in the front
Speaker 1: line of war, but dragged off the streets or out
Speaker 1: of their homes and shot in police cells. But so
Speaker 1: much more personal though, Yeah, yeah, it really is.
Speaker 2: There's a difference between a guy who's, you know, seen
Speaker 2: a lot of conflict and kills people in the trenches
Speaker 2: of World War One, because that's largely impersonal, and you know,
Speaker 2: a soldier's mindset is much different than a guy who's
Speaker 2: murdering someone in a dank basement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you always you have, at least on your conscience,
Speaker 1: like because obviously war focks people up, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I shot some people because they were shooting at me,
Speaker 1: as different from I pulled this guy away from his
Speaker 1: family during dinner. This dude I'd worked with for years,
Speaker 1: and I shot him in the back of the head.
Speaker 2: Right that they can't fight back. They're in a damp basement, probably, Yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of torture has happened before this.
Speaker 1: Yes, and this causes a tremendous amount of paranoia, right,
Speaker 1: even among the winners in these conflicts, right, they they
Speaker 1: It kind of breaks everybody's mind, right, and the atmosphere
Speaker 1: grows paranoid enough that occasionally the right people are arrested. Right.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that even happens off people.
Speaker 2: You'll eventually grab someone guilty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and one of those people is Barria. Shortly after
Speaker 1: his appointment to the Checke, he gets taken into custody
Speaker 1: by the Cheka under suspicion of anti revolutionary activity. Now,
Speaker 1: this was right, because he is executing a lot of revolutionaries.
Speaker 1: But all of the people he's killing pretty much are socialists, right,
Speaker 1: But this is not accurate in the way they care about,
Speaker 1: and he is set free and continues to work killing revolutionaries. Now.
Speaker 1: I noted a few times I'm not wildly in love
Speaker 1: with any single source for these episodes, largely because trying
Speaker 1: to do a biography. If a guy like Barria is
Speaker 1: just this horrifying task, given how much disinfo is pumped
Speaker 1: out in his lifetime, Knight's book seems pretty good. I've
Speaker 1: definitely found a couple of conclusions in her book that
Speaker 1: I've considered shaky. I like Sangster's writing, and I think
Speaker 1: he's reasonably careful, but he also might be kind of
Speaker 1: a weird right winger. Like just looking at his bibliography,
Speaker 1: I don't see anything overly insane, but his book contains
Speaker 1: like a casual Jordan Peterson quote. Oh yeah, so that
Speaker 1: was one of the things. So I'm like, well fuck,
Speaker 1: And I had like looked into the guy and like,
Speaker 1: I don't see anything right. No, his biggest thing is
Speaker 1: he's like obsessed with this guy. Yeah, he's he's a professor,
Speaker 1: and he writes this book about Alan Brooke, Churchill's right
Speaker 1: hand critic, like this this reappraisal of Lord Alan Brooke,
Speaker 1: who's this World War two British military officer. Like I
Speaker 1: don't know much about Alan Brook, but I don't see
Speaker 1: anything that's like inherently crazy about any of this. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. I just want to let you be
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson quote into worried man. Wait was that in
Speaker 1: his book about Barrier?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, were he like it's that is.
Speaker 2: The most.
Speaker 1: Possibly be It immediately made me like backtrack and check
Speaker 1: on a bunch of shit that I had. And again
Speaker 1: I didn't run into anything that was like obviously wrong.
Speaker 1: Most of what he said lines up with most of
Speaker 1: what Knight said. And like again that was.
Speaker 2: Like like biography done in Jordan Peterson's voice.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, the thing about Barrier, I didn't love it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I've got like a couple of different quotes from
Speaker 1: this or books that I use for this Night's book,
Speaker 1: Sangster's book. There's another book called On Stalin's Team that
Speaker 1: I use a lot later that's about like the whole
Speaker 1: gang around Stalin. There's a little bit of the Stalin
Speaker 1: hype house. Yeah, the Stalin hype house. So like I
Speaker 1: tried to be broad with this, and again I didn't
Speaker 1: catch Sangster just lying about anything, but you should. No,
Speaker 1: you're not going to find any like perfect sources on
Speaker 1: a guy around whom there's so much disinfo, right, and
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, the two big I think the two big
Speaker 1: things that you can argue about in terms of like
Speaker 1: what kind of Guyberia was that you can support with
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence. One is he was an absolute
Speaker 1: psychopath and one of like the most unhinged, violent evil
Speaker 1: people within the Soviet government. And the other is he
Speaker 1: was as violent and evil as he had to be
Speaker 1: to survive within the system, and he was a guy
Speaker 1: who wanted to maintain power and was willing to do
Speaker 1: terrible things to keep himself alive, but was not wildly
Speaker 1: worse than most of his colleagues, which doesn't mean he's good. Right,
Speaker 1: Those are kind of, broadly speaking, the two barriers that
Speaker 1: you can make the case see both.
Speaker 2: Yes, Like I can see those the caveat of being like, yeah,
Speaker 2: he was surrounded by yeah, human beings. Yeah, but there's
Speaker 2: not many people that rose to the the lengths that
Speaker 2: he did this, so of union asterisk that we're aware of, Yeah,
Speaker 2: did the things that he did on his own personal time.
Speaker 1: Yes, and that we will be talking about that later
Speaker 1: as well. It takes a bit to build that because
Speaker 1: a lot of that starts to happen. At least we
Speaker 1: have documentation of the sex abuse stuff once he hits Moscow,
Speaker 1: which we're not at yet right, So anyway, I just
Speaker 1: wanted to like, FYI, you should know this about our sources.
Speaker 1: You know, Area has layers like an ogre. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: and so do his biographers. And speaking of sayingster you
Speaker 1: get lines like this during a discussion of how Barria
Speaker 1: and his fellow checkists abuse their powers that I found interesting.
Speaker 1: Even modern day police officers and an open liberal democracy
Speaker 1: sometimes querry the activities of their next door neighbors. And
Speaker 1: it is understandable that in a ruthless society the sense
Speaker 1: of suspicion and doubt increases exponentially. And what he's not
Speaker 1: wrong in that, like, yeah, modern police officers abuse their
Speaker 1: powers to spy on like women they're stalking and their
Speaker 1: neighbors and shit all the time.
Speaker 2: Would hire Leventi Barry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's that part of makes me think, like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe the Jordan Peterson thing was like not evidence of
Speaker 1: anything sinister, because he's kind of being like, modern cops
Speaker 1: are terrible in a lot of the same way as
Speaker 1: Barrio was, And I don't disagree.
Speaker 2: Actually, this is when those horrible moments, even the worst
Speaker 2: guy in the world is right, you know.
Speaker 1: Not not in not inherently and unreasonable cabins.
Speaker 2: So many other quotes you could pick before you sit
Speaker 2: al John fucking Peterson.
Speaker 1: It's you know, my dad likes Jordan Peterson. And my dad,
Speaker 1: for the record, like voted for Trump once and didn't
Speaker 1: the second time and now considers the Republicans to be
Speaker 1: like a very unhinged and dangerous anti democratic, like anti
Speaker 1: democracy party. But he still thinks Jordan Peterson's like he's
Speaker 1: not on Twitter, you know, he doesn't see it.
Speaker 2: You have an opinion on the Chinese uh dick sucking
Speaker 2: machines that pet Peterson.
Speaker 1: He didn't believe me when I told him that. So
Speaker 1: you do have to keep in mind there are some
Speaker 1: normies out there that like casually read Jordan Peterson's self
Speaker 1: help book about and we're.
Speaker 3: Like across it a lot, like a lot of a
Speaker 3: lot of on like when you when you meet somebody
Speaker 3: like for the first time they and you ask them,
Speaker 3: like what they're reading. A lot of times it's that,
Speaker 3: and it's very innocent because they're not criminally online.
Speaker 4: Like we are, Like they just don't know or are
Speaker 4: not focused on politics at all, and and they just
Speaker 4: come across a self help book and they're like, Wow,
Speaker 4: this is really interesting, and it's like oh, and then
Speaker 4: you have to give them a bad news about him,
Speaker 4: and you're.
Speaker 1: Like, believes the Chinese government is harvesting come from prisoners.
Speaker 2: And actually, sir, did you know? And it also means
Speaker 2: they haven't listened to an interview from Jordan Peterson in
Speaker 2: the last several years.
Speaker 1: It's they have it's this the book, same thing. I
Speaker 1: have some like friends who are not online and fairly
Speaker 1: nice people who like listened to Joe Rogan ten years
Speaker 1: ago and are like, yeah, he seems fine, and it's like, well, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like how much is it worth arguing about this?
Speaker 2: Like I myself was the first podcast I ever listened
Speaker 2: to is Joe Rogan, And you know, I listened to
Speaker 2: it for a fair amount of time until like Brett
Speaker 2: Weinstein and shit started coming on and I was like, ooh,
Speaker 2: this is this is too fucked up for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, So I don't know. I haven't listened to
Speaker 1: Sangster's podcast appearances, but like I haven't run into anything
Speaker 1: at least in his bibliography that makes me think he's
Speaker 1: like clearly insane. But people should be aware of this
Speaker 1: caveat so even within the checkup, Barria is controversial. He
Speaker 1: was accused of repeatedly convicting the wrong people for political
Speaker 1: gain or plain mean spiritedness, and for allowing actual political
Speaker 1: enemies of the New State to escape. Right Like, he's
Speaker 1: constantly letting people who are actually trying to like bring
Speaker 1: back the monarchy to get out of jail and executing
Speaker 1: like socialists who had fought against the czar.
Speaker 2: When you put when you put so much resources into
Speaker 2: taking out your own political opponents, you kind of missed
Speaker 2: the broader spectrum of actual political opponents.
Speaker 1: Right right, And in between executing and arresting basically whoever,
Speaker 1: he engaged in some light pedophilia. All right, Yeah, there
Speaker 1: we you go. We're not getting into like the most
Speaker 1: problematic stuff, but this is bad. He first met Nina
Speaker 1: Gagechkory age sixteen, through one of her relatives, who was
Speaker 1: a prominent Georgian Bolshevik. He had spent this guy her
Speaker 1: Her relative had spent time in prison with Baria and
Speaker 1: apparently told Nina, hey, I was locked up with this
Speaker 1: weird murderer everybody scared of. He should go on a
Speaker 1: date with this guy. I mean that's how I met
Speaker 1: my first wife. Sure, right, you know who wouldn't take
Speaker 1: that that bitch.
Speaker 2: I mean so yeah, I say, you know, it's one
Speaker 2: more thing he hasn't cobbled with Stalin.
Speaker 1: Yeah girls, instead of his his online dating profile. Instead
Speaker 1: of like holding up a fish, it's this like bloody dude.
Speaker 1: He shot in the back of the head, like you know,
Speaker 1: thanks to a pickup truck once again, Yeah Texans and
Speaker 1: his quotes from Jordan Peterson. So they go on a
Speaker 1: date or whatever, and Barria proposes soon after, and when
Speaker 1: they get married in nineteen twenty one, she is still
Speaker 1: a child. Now we get different accounts of what I
Speaker 1: don't know, if you'd call you wouldn't call this a
Speaker 1: meet cute, But we get different accounts of how they
Speaker 1: actually meet, and none of them are from flawless sources.
Speaker 1: One story comes from Stalin's daughters, Fetlana Alilujeva, who was
Speaker 1: a bit of a mess herself, although it is hard
Speaker 1: to blame her for that, right Stelen is her dad.
Speaker 2: You get some grace from me for that.
Speaker 1: She claims that Barria visited Nina's village when he was
Speaker 1: promoted to the same job that he did for the
Speaker 1: Checka in Baku, but Intoblisi, Nina came to him to
Speaker 1: beg for her brother's release.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: Barria had arrived in a special train, Nina entered his
Speaker 1: car and never again saw her native village. She was
Speaker 1: carried off her beauty, having caught the police boss's fancy.
Speaker 1: He locked her up in a compartment. That was how
Speaker 1: she became his wife. Now that's a pretty horrifying story.
Speaker 1: The timing of Barry's actual promotions with when we know
Speaker 1: he met Nina doesn't quite match up. Now, it's it's
Speaker 1: very likely, in fact that Svetlana might have the broad
Speaker 1: strokes right, but have gotten some dates and stuff wrong.
Speaker 1: You know, wouldn't be weird, Sangster notes. Quote the story
Speaker 1: Stalin's daughter relates probably grew from the possibility that they
Speaker 1: had eloped on Barry's train. Despite his sexual predatory nature.
Speaker 1: The marriage lasted end quote. She remained in love with
Speaker 1: her charmer for the rest of her life.
Speaker 2: How many people get whisked away in their own personal train,
Speaker 2: you know, right?
Speaker 1: I mean that is pretty romantic if you discount all
Speaker 1: of the horrible things.
Speaker 2: You want to get on my murder train, baby girl? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, who doesn't Who doesn't want to murder train? Right?
Speaker 2: I know? I could go for a murder train, so
Speaker 2: I have to settle for a public train. Sucks.
Speaker 1: Yeahs no, no, no, there's cameras. It's fucked up.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Amy Knight provides a different accounting of events. She
Speaker 1: notes that Barria met Nina when Nina was fifteen, and
Speaker 1: Nina comes to visit her relative in prison when he's
Speaker 1: locked up with Barria. Baria, from prison is enraptured by
Speaker 1: the beauty of this child and remains obsessed with her.
Speaker 1: When the Bolsheviks take Georgia, Nina moves to Tableisi with
Speaker 1: her adopted family, and Baria becomes a regular HouseGuest. Quote.
Speaker 1: Nina was still young and a lighthearted schoolgirl. She once
Speaker 1: carelessly joined other students in a demonstration against the Bolsheviks,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that she was living in the home
Speaker 1: of a prominent Bolshevik. She later recalled in an interview
Speaker 1: given when she was already in her mid eighties how
Speaker 1: on that occasion she came home soaking wet because the
Speaker 1: police had sprayed the student demonstrators with water. Sasha's wife, Mary,
Speaker 1: was furious, threatening to whip Nina because she had expressed
Speaker 1: opposition to the Bolsheviks. One day, Barria stopped her on
Speaker 1: her way to school and asked her to meet him
Speaker 1: later for a talk. Nino agreed, and when they met,
Speaker 1: barr a proposed marriage. She recalled, We sat on a
Speaker 1: bench Lavnti was wearing a black topcoat and a student's
Speaker 1: service cap. He told me that for a long time
Speaker 1: he had been very taken with me. What is more,
Speaker 1: he said that he loved me and wanted to marry me.
Speaker 1: I was sixteen years old at the time. And so
Speaker 1: that's the version of events that she would later give,
Speaker 1: you know, Nino would later you see it both as
Speaker 1: Nino and Nina. That's the version that she would give, right.
Speaker 1: And in this version of events, which like, I don't
Speaker 1: know which of these all of these are bad because
Speaker 1: she is a child in all of these, her recollection
Speaker 1: of events is that like, yeah, he kind of like
Speaker 1: sweeps her off her feet, right.
Speaker 2: No, did romantic hopeless romantic romantic Baria. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, in this version of events, Barria wanted to go
Speaker 1: to Belgium to study oil processing for the Soviet government,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't send an unmarried man, and she agrees
Speaker 1: to marry him because it's better to have one's own
Speaker 1: family than to live in someone else's, which is not
Speaker 1: an uncommon story that like, and again you have to
Speaker 1: think this is a different time. She's like living with
Speaker 1: her parents and under her dad's roof and is like, well,
Speaker 1: I would rather be the number two person in my
Speaker 1: household than.
Speaker 2: A child in my household. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know, I'm not trying to give Barria any
Speaker 1: slack here, but like that's her recollection of why she
Speaker 1: makes the call.
Speaker 2: Right sixteen for the era wouldn't have been too out
Speaker 2: of pocket or anything.
Speaker 1: It was not the norm, but it was not something
Speaker 1: that most people would have considered really problematic either, right.
Speaker 2: It's not like, you know, like the story about Stalin's
Speaker 2: underage mistress is much more glaring because I believe she
Speaker 2: was either thirteen or fourteen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thing, and He's there's a lot going to be
Speaker 1: a lot more problematic shit about Barrier, underage people and
Speaker 1: just women in general that's coming later.
Speaker 2: This is the most the most innocent thing about him,
Speaker 2: because at least it was romantic.
Speaker 1: But at least that's how Nino recalls it. Right now, again,
Speaker 1: I want to really emphasize every variant of the story here,
Speaker 1: including Nino's agrees that Barry had deliberately sought out a
Speaker 1: child bride, right, calling the pedophile very fair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I take back what I said gross.
Speaker 1: Her version of events is that like, I was down
Speaker 1: because it meant more freedom for me, basically being number
Speaker 1: two in a household as opposed to a child, which
Speaker 1: again that's what she recalls.
Speaker 2: And she gets to go to Belgium, who doesn't.
Speaker 1: Tragically, Baria never winds up visiting Belgium. This just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: In late nineteen twenty two, he gets transferred to to
Speaker 1: Bleezy as part of a plan by the Bolsheviks to
Speaker 1: make their suppressing suppression of outlying territories seem less like
Speaker 1: a foreign occupation by having locals do the mass murdering
Speaker 1: of dissonance. And again this is part of why Svetlana's
Speaker 1: account that he kidnaps her on a train doesn't quite work,
Speaker 1: because they have already met by the time he's made
Speaker 1: head of the Cheka, right or deputy head of the
Speaker 1: check or something like that. There's a lot of different
Speaker 1: titles he goes through, so by this point, although still
Speaker 1: pretty young, Barrya's personality is fully formed and his driving
Speaker 1: motivation seems to be the desire to improve his own
Speaker 1: situation through cunning and brutal violence. He becomes known for
Speaker 1: such quotes as, when we Bolsheviks want to get something done,
Speaker 1: los our eyes to everything else. Never a good sign,
Speaker 1: good way to do some mass murdering, I always say,
Speaker 1: Sophie will tell you. That's my catchphrase. Baby podcasters are
Speaker 1: the same way.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: Georgian nationalism was still a major force in the area,
Speaker 1: which threatened Soviet plans to unite it with the Zerbazan
Speaker 1: in Armenia as a single block within the Greater USSR.
Speaker 1: Barya is tasked with crushing this desire for independence. Mensheviks
Speaker 1: are also murdered in moss and by nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 1: mass graves had become a common sight Sangster rights. During
Speaker 1: these early years, Barra proved to be cunning and proficient
Speaker 1: at seeking out and killing the opposition. Whole families and villages.
Speaker 1: People with the same surnames or the slightest connections were
Speaker 1: murdered by the Checha and the army. There was no mercy.
Speaker 1: It amounted to thousands upon thousands of victims of his
Speaker 1: own participation in these crimes. Barya would later write whatever
Speaker 1: cruelty that the checha had to carry out receded in
Speaker 1: my youthful conception at the time into the foggy distance,
Speaker 1: and I pictured only the difficult, dangerous obligations in the
Speaker 1: name of humanity's happiness. This is accurate also to Sam
Speaker 1: Bankman Freed, who recently got sentenced to twenty five years
Speaker 1: in prison. If you can't tell anyone anything that I
Speaker 1: do is justified because I'm doing it for the happiness
Speaker 1: of humanity. Again, you gotta shoot them, you know.
Speaker 2: You know, the one thing that really improves humanity's happiness
Speaker 2: from my own personal experience is mass graves.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Oh my god, who doesn't love a nice
Speaker 1: mask grave. You can have a picnic on them and
Speaker 1: flowers grow wells green.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Ass.
Speaker 1: People talk about the downside of mass graves all the time,
Speaker 1: but never any of the benefits.
Speaker 2: You know, everybody's so negative all the time.
Speaker 1: A couple generations later, free bones. Who doesn't like bones?
Speaker 1: You know, skulls are expensive. I know, my skull guy
Speaker 1: is fucking taking an arm and a leg out of
Speaker 1: me these days.
Speaker 2: And you know, several generations, you know, thousands of years
Speaker 2: in the future. Boom oil uh huh, that's right again.
Speaker 1: It's almost green Joe, you know, circ thinking, Yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: You turn them from people who are using oil and
Speaker 1: polluting to people who are generating oil.
Speaker 2: And natural energy. Baby mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: It's like a solar panel. So barius thoroughness earned him
Speaker 1: the respect of Stalin, who was known to deport several
Speaker 1: loyal Bolsheviks to the East for the crime of not
Speaker 1: getting along with Barria. In one case, Barria asked for
Speaker 1: a deported rifle to be recalled to Tablizi so that
Speaker 1: he could beat the man for fun. Other gifts given
Speaker 1: to Barria for his service in nineteen twenty two included
Speaker 1: a gold watch for courage and a pair of Browning
Speaker 1: automatic rifles, which is a legitimately rad gift. A pair, yeah,
Speaker 1: a pair. Can't just have one, bar Man, you gotta
Speaker 1: double down on that shit.
Speaker 2: Do you have barrier fucking bars at Kimbo, which is
Speaker 2: like the ultimate version h fuck.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: By the spring of nineteen twenty two, the Federation of
Speaker 1: Transcaucasian Republics, which Barria and his colleagues had battered into
Speaker 1: submission on Moscow's orders, was inducted into the USSR. As
Speaker 1: a single entity. The actual road to this point was
Speaker 1: so brutal. Again, they have to kill all of these
Speaker 1: Armenian and Azeri and Georgian nationalists, politicians and all of
Speaker 1: these like kind of middle of the road's social democrats
Speaker 1: who had wanted their to want an independent Armenian or
Speaker 1: a Zeri republics right or Georgian republics. You have to
Speaker 1: kill all of these people, right. And this means that
Speaker 1: like Barria and his colleagues are murdering so many people
Speaker 1: that Lenin becomes aware of how many people have been
Speaker 1: massacred to avoid and this isn't just to avoid them
Speaker 1: entering the USSR. A lot of its people are killed
Speaker 1: to avoid having them join the USSR as separate CAUCAUSUS
Speaker 1: states right for whatever reason, this is important, and Lenin
Speaker 1: gets kind of pissed off and he demands the check
Speaker 1: US sees its violence in Georgia. Now, this is going
Speaker 1: to be a pattern. Every time there's like a mass
Speaker 1: purge that kills a shitload of people, whoever's running the
Speaker 1: USSR will have to once it ends, punish the people
Speaker 1: who did the massacre in order to lie try and
Speaker 1: make the survivors not rebel basically right, because.
Speaker 2: Like Lennon is a guy who really fucking hated the Caucuses,
Speaker 2: and even he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow.
Speaker 1: Down, her, buddy, you kill how many people?
Speaker 2: Come on? Man?
Speaker 1: And I think part of why he's pissed is that, like,
Speaker 1: he is aware that a lot of the people who
Speaker 1: get killed were people who like made the revolution happen, right,
Speaker 1: and then get murdered. Now by then, most of the
Speaker 1: people who might have provided resistance to an ambitious man
Speaker 1: like Barria were dead, and he used his position in
Speaker 1: Georgia as an engine to repel, to propel himself upwards
Speaker 1: into the hierarchy of the USSR. During this time, revolutionary
Speaker 1: fervor was still fresh, and men like Barria were expected
Speaker 1: to live somewhat experimental lifestyles in line with their radical beliefs.
Speaker 1: Private displays of wealth were frowned upon, and Barria eventually
Speaker 1: formally requested to share quarters with his boss because communal
Speaker 1: living was seen as proper communist stuff. Again, yeah, horrible roommate,
Speaker 1: he's planning to kill you constantly. Actually, it's a lot
Speaker 1: like most roommates I've had.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 1: So he spends a significant amount of time with lower
Speaker 1: ranking checkists, which historian antonov Osinko notes was absolutely to
Speaker 1: spy on them.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: At first everyone trusted Lavarenti Barria completely, but upon knowing
Speaker 1: him better, they were not able to be friendly with him.
Speaker 1: He was a master of intrigue and denunciation like no
Speaker 1: one else. He was able at the right moment to
Speaker 1: unleash a nasty rumor in order to ensnare his rivals
Speaker 1: on the weight to the top. Then he would persecute
Speaker 1: them one by one. In doing so, the young Barrio,
Speaker 1: whenever necessary, would convincingly play the role of a good
Speaker 1: old chap, simple and jolly. That's how we remember him,
Speaker 1: jolly old Barria.
Speaker 2: I always think of Laventi Barrias as a jolly old chap.
Speaker 2: And then has this guy ever been in a room
Speaker 2: with anyone he wasn't actively spying on?
Speaker 1: Well, no, but you know who amongst us hasn't constantly
Speaker 1: spied upon our bosses and subordinates in order to sophie
Speaker 1: hey present company excluidedo.
Speaker 2: I have like three guys going through my producer's trash
Speaker 2: as we speak.
Speaker 1: Normal stuff. Speaking of normal Joe, That's the end of
Speaker 1: part one.
Speaker 2: Of four.
Speaker 1: What do you got for plugs to be plugged?
Speaker 2: I am the host of the Lines of My Donkey's podcast.
Speaker 2: We talk about military disasters, crazy stories from military history,
Speaker 2: and also all around horrible shit, much like your show.
Speaker 2: And I'm also a science fiction author. And you can
Speaker 2: find my newest series, The Undying Legion anywhere that you
Speaker 2: procure your books from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, check out Joe's books, check out Joe's podcast.
Speaker 1: And you know, get really good at digging if you
Speaker 1: intend to get into revolutionary politics. You know, always good
Speaker 1: to be able to dig a big hole. You know
Speaker 1: a lot of things you can do with a whole
Speaker 1: lot of things. You can put the whole.
Speaker 2: So the supervisors, you can put in the whole.
Speaker 1: Supervisors, your boss, your roommate, your roommate boss, put them
Speaker 1: all in the hole. That guy, problem's gone. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: guy you dislike. That guy you like everyone. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the number one person to put in the hole.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: This has been Behind the Bastards, Goodbye.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 3: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast