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 Gazawe 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. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: trying to help them, you know, get to a safer place,
Speaker 1: so please consider donating if you can. Oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: behind the Bastard's a podcast that opens in a different,
Speaker 1: slightly less competent way each week. Because when you you know,
Speaker 1: when you're on top, baby, it's time to slack off.
Speaker 1: It's time to just really really fuck up hard.
Speaker 2: That's how I that was so annoying.
Speaker 3: What are you doing, Sophie? Are all annoying?
Speaker 1: Who are we? Where are we? When are we? These
Speaker 1: are all questions.
Speaker 2: I mean I could answer them, but I feel I
Speaker 2: could be also annoying.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of not annoying, true, Joe Kasabian, our guest
Speaker 1: host of the co host of the Lions Led by
Speaker 1: Donkeys podcast, author of numerous books of science fiction and
Speaker 1: one book of non fiction.
Speaker 3: Joe, Hello, Hey, it's it's good to still be here
Speaker 3: getting you know, intensely very appilled with everyone else. Oh no,
Speaker 3: Barry appelled is a bad, bad way to turn that.
Speaker 3: I've already said it. I didn't poison quite a few people.
Speaker 3: I do already have spies coming to Oregon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I mean we all do, right.
Speaker 1: That's the lesson from Laverni Barria is always be spying
Speaker 1: on your friends and co workers. It's the only way
Speaker 1: to stay ahead of them, you know, which is why
Speaker 1: I've got you know, I don't actually know what joke
Speaker 1: to make about this, because it will get increasingly creepy,
Speaker 1: just like Laventi Barria, who has gotten increasingly creepy by
Speaker 1: this point in the story. Now, Joe, when we left off,
Speaker 1: Lavrenti is, you know, helping to run the cheka in
Speaker 1: George I A. He has helped to overthrow the nationalist
Speaker 1: movements and the Mensheviks in the rest of the caucuses
Speaker 1: and deliver them to the USSR neatly wrapped and packaged
Speaker 1: with a bow on top. Thank yeah, thanks for that.
Speaker 1: It's gonna go great. It's gotta go great now, Joe.
Speaker 1: One criticism often lobbied against the modern Western left is
Speaker 1: that it is basically a bunch of cliques and friend
Speaker 1: groups organized around a political tendency, and not really a
Speaker 1: mass movement capable of building or holding power. Now, there
Speaker 1: are fair aspect to this criticism, but one interesting thing
Speaker 1: that you get beat over the head with when you
Speaker 1: study Stalin is that the leadership cast of the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union was just a handful of cliques and friend groups,
Speaker 1: all of which were also increasingly cults of personality. Right,
Speaker 1: it was like people's friend groups, and they were all
Speaker 1: shitty friends, but they were all kind of buddies, and
Speaker 1: like the ruling cast was like a bunch of buds
Speaker 1: fucking each other over.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The only thing that separates like, you know, your theory
Speaker 3: reading group and the central Soviet is having a bunch
Speaker 3: of people like Barrio willing to fill mass graves for you.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, And that is how Stalin ruled in the
Speaker 1: early days of the USSR. After Lenin died in Trotzky
Speaker 1: was expelled, Stalin and his gang of buddies ruled from
Speaker 1: a compound in the capitol and basically spent all of
Speaker 1: their time together. Stalin's gang would use the familiar form
Speaker 1: t y to refer to him, which I understand is
Speaker 1: the Russian equivalent of like calling someone bro, but really
Speaker 1: meaning it right, like this big. It's the same thing
Speaker 1: that people in Hitler's inner circle would use, like the
Speaker 1: familiar term do with him, where it's like, we don't
Speaker 1: really have this in English as like grammatical constructs, but
Speaker 1: it's like casually referring to somebody instead of being like
Speaker 1: grand you know, leader or fewer or whatever, you're like, hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: you know it only really you know, weird, you know
Speaker 1: it's crazy in there. Oh my god. Definitely. So one
Speaker 1: term you'll hear applied to Stalin's crew is commanda, which
Speaker 1: is the Russian word for team. Sheila Fispatrick, author of
Speaker 1: on Stalin's Team, which is a book about said team,
Speaker 1: prefers this word. She uses the term team, but notes
Speaker 1: quote alternatives are available. You could call it a gang
Speaker 1: sika if you wanted to claim that its activities ruling
Speaker 1: a country had an illegitimate quality that made them essentially
Speaker 1: criminal rather than governmental. You could call it the polit
Speaker 1: bureau that is, the executive organ of the Communist Party's
Speaker 1: Central Committee, elected by a periodic party congresses, which is
Speaker 1: semi correct since the membership was very similar, but owing
Speaker 1: the Stalin preference for informal working groups, never quite the same.
Speaker 1: Or you could call it a faction, another pejorative term
Speaker 1: and Soviet discourse. For my part, when I read histories
Speaker 1: that really discuss, especially the social dynamics of the people
Speaker 1: around Stalin, I see a lot that's familiar to the
Speaker 1: way that like cults of personality form online around influential
Speaker 1: people who grow deranged and throw their followers into increasingly
Speaker 1: aggressive crusades against whoever they hate. I'm thinking about a
Speaker 1: specific moment on Twitter where a lady made chili for
Speaker 1: somebody and it just brokes some people out of their
Speaker 1: fucking minds because they were all friendsly of this one
Speaker 1: fucking freak, and yeah, spend their time abusing each other
Speaker 1: on the.
Speaker 3: Internet or the door dash discourse.
Speaker 1: Right, you get these like you get a couple of
Speaker 1: influential people and then their hangers on and buddies and
Speaker 1: they all just kind of like have these private little
Speaker 1: groups where they chat and lose their minds together. Right,
Speaker 1: That is kind of what happens with the gang around Stalin,
Speaker 1: with him and his buddies, as they as the time
Speaker 1: that they're in power gets longer, and thus the distance
Speaker 1: between the period of time in which they lived anything
Speaker 1: that resembled a normal life gets further away. You can
Speaker 1: also see like when people get crazy rich suddenly, right,
Speaker 1: how they increasingly lose touch with reality and eventually lose
Speaker 1: their minds. Yeah, it's exactly. And these people, like, once
Speaker 1: you're in power in the way that Stalin and his
Speaker 1: friends are, you're able to bend a lot of reality
Speaker 1: around you, and it does derange you to an extent. Right,
Speaker 1: there's dynamic much power that much.
Speaker 3: Well can end up normal regardless of what their intentions are.
Speaker 3: It's fucking impossible.
Speaker 1: The last thing Kanye got right before he lost his
Speaker 1: mind for the same reasons. Right, No one man should
Speaker 1: have all that power, No one friend group should have
Speaker 1: all that power.
Speaker 3: No one man should have that much power, and that
Speaker 3: one man should not have a record deal.
Speaker 1: No, No, absolutely not so less sinister, but perhaps not
Speaker 1: much less dangerous. I also see very normal dynamics of
Speaker 1: friendship replicated in a situation where decision makers had absolutely
Speaker 1: zero outside accountability or real access to the world outside
Speaker 1: of their little circle of buds. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from Sheila again here, to a degree unusual among
Speaker 1: political leaders, Stalin's political and social life were intertwined. He
Speaker 1: socialized largely with the team in their Krimlin apartments or
Speaker 1: out at his datcha. And by the way, when we
Speaker 1: use the term datcha, this is like a normal thing.
Speaker 1: And it's not just Russia, in Russian life, but like
Speaker 1: I mean, it's normal in Ukraine too. Most a lot
Speaker 1: of people have like a little country house. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: just like a little shack or a cabin, yeah, that
Speaker 1: you like go to during the summer. You have a
Speaker 1: garden there, you know. In Stalin's case, the datcha is
Speaker 1: like a mansion, you know, but it's where you go
Speaker 1: to hang out on the weekend to get away from it.
Speaker 3: Not my people's revolutionary hero in his Soviet country house. Yeah,
Speaker 3: all true. You know, revolutionaries for the common man have
Speaker 3: multiple homes in picturesque places.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, very normal behavior. Yeah, so it is important
Speaker 1: to note that Stalin's gang or friend group are not
Speaker 1: just inconsequential toadies. While Stalin always exercised the ultimate power,
Speaker 1: the men that he surrounded himself with were not just
Speaker 1: there to like fluff him up. They ran important ministries
Speaker 1: and sometimes did so competently. Right, Some of these guys
Speaker 1: know what they're doing, at least in some situations. Now,
Speaker 1: nearly all of them get into positions where the things
Speaker 1: they have power with wildly exceed their capabilities.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: That happens often, but they all most of them have
Speaker 1: actual areas of expertise too, where they're actually reasonably competent,
Speaker 1: which is why some stuff that, like, you know, the
Speaker 1: USS are it's not the Nazis, right, the Nazis. The
Speaker 1: only thing the Nazi state ever accomplishes is death. The
Speaker 1: Soviet Union does stuff like completely reverse the state of
Speaker 1: illiteracy in the Russian aaries right like, it has legitimate success.
Speaker 1: It actually is a state.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not every empire is like black and white evil
Speaker 3: at the We all like to think of them that
Speaker 3: way because it makes conceptualizing them much much easier. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that they ever did anything good for their citizens, and
Speaker 3: even the most horrific empires of all time. There wasn't
Speaker 3: that positive for people in it for a period of
Speaker 3: time until it hits its termal decline, right at some point.
Speaker 1: Right, it's important to remember, like the USSR doesn't beat
Speaker 1: the US to getting a man into space on accident. Right,
Speaker 1: there were things they did well, right because unlike the Nazis,
Speaker 1: they weren't just dedicated to murdering everything around them. You know,
Speaker 1: there were things that were accomplished, and it's accomplished by
Speaker 1: a lot of these guys. Right, they're parts of this
Speaker 1: because they're not bad at everything. So you know the
Speaker 1: kind of core group what becomes the core group because
Speaker 1: Barry is not part of Stalin's inner circle yet, but
Speaker 1: as you know, if you watch the movie Death of Stalin,
Speaker 1: it eventually includes guys like Molotov of the Molotov Ribbon Trot,
Speaker 1: packed our buddy Laveria Malankov, Nikita Krushchev. You know, these
Speaker 1: guys are all kind of they're not all in his
Speaker 1: inner circle yet, but they're kind of coming together in
Speaker 1: his inner circle during this period of time.
Speaker 3: Around drinking and watching cowboy movies. They which was.
Speaker 1: I hated doing that, Stalin loved to make them do that. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's the thing that he did that I like the most. Like,
Speaker 1: un ironically, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: It's like an ultimate flexx is We're gonna sit around
Speaker 3: watching shitty spaghetti westerns like Blackout and pissing on yourselves
Speaker 3: from my own entertainment. It's kind of be a version
Speaker 3: of a court jester.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly people's jester. So for a man of
Speaker 1: Barry's ambition in this period, rising up the ranks of
Speaker 1: the Cheka in Georgia and making a name for himself
Speaker 1: was like, this was not his ultimate goal. This was
Speaker 1: he saw it as an integral part of his plan
Speaker 1: to worm his way into Stalin's gang. And Barry it
Speaker 1: was savvy enough to recognize that emulating the Great leader's
Speaker 1: tactics was what was going to help him form his
Speaker 1: own power base within Georgia and later the USSR. So
Speaker 1: Barry began to gather a gang of the worst killers
Speaker 1: and rapists in the Secret Police around himself. They socialized together. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's kind of doing a mimicry of Stalin's inner circle, right,
Speaker 1: you know, he gets these guys together, they hang out together,
Speaker 1: they socialize, they eat, they drink, they brainstorm new methods
Speaker 1: of torturing people.
Speaker 3: Just normal everyday guy stuff. Yeah, just guys, be bros.
Speaker 1: You know. Victor Surge a Russian Marxist revolutionary who fought
Speaker 1: as a Bolshevik. He starts out as an anarchist, but
Speaker 1: he fights as a Bolshevik during the revolution and becomes
Speaker 1: a critic of Stalin described Baria and his friends this way.
Speaker 1: The only temperaments that devoted themselves willingly and tenaciously to
Speaker 1: this task of internal defense were those characterized by suspicion, embitterment, harshness,
Speaker 1: and sadism. The check has inevitably consisted of perverted men
Speaker 1: tending to see conspiracy everywhere and to live in the
Speaker 1: midst of perpetual conspiracy themselves. Now this is part two,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure after part one we've already got some
Speaker 1: weird Soviet Union stands attacking these episodes as anti Communist propaganda,
Speaker 1: which is why I bring up Surge. Most of the
Speaker 1: lurid details of Barious crimes come from other Communists, because
Speaker 1: that's mostly who he murdered. At this point. In fact,
Speaker 1: Barria's biographers spend a lot of time busting myths about
Speaker 1: him by other communists because some of those guys were
Speaker 1: just making up shit about him to hide their own
Speaker 1: crimes in the post Stalinist era. Not Surge though. I
Speaker 1: think he's a pretty reasonable on the ball dude, and
Speaker 1: we'll stop talking about him soon. But I do want
Speaker 1: to show Joe a picture of Victor Surge, because my god,
Speaker 1: this guy had Look at the drip on this man.
Speaker 1: Look at this outfit, Sophie, look at that.
Speaker 3: Oh the hell?
Speaker 1: Yeah that he's got like a fucking like fur lined
Speaker 1: cape on a military uniform. He's got these like circle
Speaker 1: glassle he's got his hair slicked back like he's just undeniable.
Speaker 3: Drip. You can he looks like he's about to fight
Speaker 3: the photographer. Yes, he sure does. He's got that look
Speaker 3: on his face. Just incredible drip. Now.
Speaker 1: Another Georgian, Jaranti Kikozzi, described barious checkists this way as
Speaker 1: quote men without kith or kin, who in most cases
Speaker 1: knew no trade, had no ad ucation, and were skilled
Speaker 1: only an espionage and murder. Some were sadists by nature.
Speaker 1: Some entered the service as insurance for themselves. And this
Speaker 1: is definitely in line with how most people want to
Speaker 1: view the kind of humans who carry out crimes of
Speaker 1: this nature, but I don't really think it's broadly accurate.
Speaker 1: It's at least I mean, there's some guys that that
Speaker 1: is absolutely a fitting description of who are in the cheka,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't fit everybody. Biographer Amy Knight tells the
Speaker 1: story of a check a man named Schulmann, and it's
Speaker 1: like shul apostrophe m a n He was responsible for
Speaker 1: guarding prisons and carrying out executions, and is known to
Speaker 1: have murdered at least three hundred people with his bare hands.
Speaker 1: God Like, I don't know if he was strangled like like,
Speaker 1: but like personally killed three hundred people, right.
Speaker 3: Like, once you start hitting the hundreds, he probably switches
Speaker 3: it up just to keep Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: You want to avoid getting like the murderer's equivalent of
Speaker 1: tennis elbow.
Speaker 3: Murderer's niece in the Tommy John surgery because you blow
Speaker 3: out your elbow killing political Yeah yeah, yeah, you get fucking.
Speaker 1: Carpoald tunnel because you're strangling so many dudes.
Speaker 3: Doctor said, I got to do a knife next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a medicinal gutting knife. So despite this, and
Speaker 1: contrary to Kekozzi's description, Shulman was a family man, you know,
Speaker 1: outside of his murdering job. He's known as being like
Speaker 1: a pretty good husband and father and seems to have been.
Speaker 1: He's described as being inclined by nature to just be
Speaker 1: a bureaucrat, a paper pusher. He was so not naturally
Speaker 1: suited to being a killer that in order to psych
Speaker 1: himself up to execute people, he had to quote in
Speaker 1: This is Night writing, create in himself the necessary bloodthirsty
Speaker 1: mood of the commandment of death by narcoticizing himself by
Speaker 1: every means available and bringing himself to a complete state
Speaker 1: of insanity. So he basically he has to get fucking
Speaker 1: blackout drunk to murder people, right, because he just doesn't
Speaker 1: quite equivalent of a.
Speaker 3: Berserker, right, right, right? I Mean that's also a lot
Speaker 3: of people want to believe the most simple thing, most easily,
Speaker 3: the most thing easy for them to understan and to
Speaker 3: them as a normal human being, is like, well, I
Speaker 3: wouldn't do that. No one I know would do that.
Speaker 3: Only insane, bloodthirsty maniacs would do something like that, And
Speaker 3: that is just demonstrably untrue throughout history. Yeah, whether it
Speaker 3: be dudes in the Checha ss Indset's group in Gestapo,
Speaker 3: you name it, Like, the vast majority of people are normal,
Speaker 3: and that is why it's terrifying. That's easy alt bloodthirsty psychopaths.
Speaker 3: But the reason why it's scary is because it's it
Speaker 3: could be your fucking neighbor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there are don't don't get me wrong. There
Speaker 1: are a number, a higher number than average, and an
Speaker 1: average group of people among the czech I just like
Speaker 1: the ass are fucking bug fuck nuts. Oh, but not
Speaker 1: most of them at any given point in time, because.
Speaker 3: They're just normal people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like you need more people than just the crazies
Speaker 1: to get all this killing done. You know. Now, we
Speaker 1: don't know how many people Barria had executed in Georgia
Speaker 1: during this period. Former chechist Dumbadzi, a major source on
Speaker 1: Baria in this time, estimates that about eighty percent of
Speaker 1: executions were never publicized. Right, so we just will not
Speaker 1: know how many people were killed. One of the bloodiest
Speaker 1: moments in Bria's tenure came after a rebel leader, if
Speaker 1: Aliko Zugeli, was captured. He had been planning a revolt
Speaker 1: and once he gets captured, he begs the Cheka, hey,
Speaker 1: let me tell my comrades don't do this, like give
Speaker 1: up trying to fight the state. It'll save a lot
Speaker 1: of lives. But Barry is like, no, no, no, we
Speaker 1: want there to be an uprising because when there's an uprising,
Speaker 1: then we can kill a bunch of people. Right then
Speaker 1: we can actually get rid of these folks rather than
Speaker 1: letting them lie dormant in the state. And for a
Speaker 1: few days, this revolution carries off, and it's like a
Speaker 1: Menshevik uprising right against the Bolsheviks. It has a lot
Speaker 1: of particularly and kind of like the rural and areas
Speaker 1: outside of the big cities. They hold a decent amount
Speaker 1: of territory for a while, right again, mostly in these
Speaker 1: areas where the Mensheviks had been dominant. But by September
Speaker 1: of nineteen twenty three, the Cheka had cracked down, arresting
Speaker 1: the ringleaders, and Baria made an offer to the arrested
Speaker 1: prisoners as they awaited execution. You are defeated, but the
Speaker 1: fighting contains use here and there. You the Committee, are
Speaker 1: able to stop these armed detachments. Make a declaration urging
Speaker 1: these isolated attachments to put down their arms, and on
Speaker 1: our side, we will not harm them. We will stop
Speaker 1: all the rests and mass executions.
Speaker 3: I feel like that was a lie.
Speaker 1: Look, if you are carrying out an uprising and the
Speaker 1: people say, if you give up and go home, we
Speaker 1: won't kill any of you, They're absolutely going to kill
Speaker 1: all of you.
Speaker 3: Right, I can't believe.
Speaker 1: I can't trust levent I Beria. I know who can
Speaker 1: you even trust anymore?
Speaker 3: If not Baria.
Speaker 1: So the arrested leaders signed a document in which they
Speaker 1: identified themselves as upper class revolutionaries, which was not entirely true,
Speaker 1: and once Barria has this document, he uses it as
Speaker 1: the pretext to carry out mass arrests and executions anyway,
Speaker 1: using this sign confession to publicize that the uprising had
Speaker 1: really been like wealthy, recidivist spoil sports trying to end
Speaker 1: the people's revolution. This provided all the justification needed for
Speaker 1: a full purging of the countryside and all remaining Menshevik
Speaker 1: sympathizers Therein night rights, armed detachments composed of army and
Speaker 1: Cheka troops raided villages and killed entire families and one
Speaker 1: Georgian village, all families bearing one particular last name were
Speaker 1: completely annihilated, including women and small children. Some estimates on
Speaker 1: the number of those arrested and executed by the Cheka
Speaker 1: ranged as high as seven thousand to ten thousand, including
Speaker 1: prominent Menshevik leaders. Good God, So yeah, got to get
Speaker 1: those kids killed.
Speaker 3: You know those kids are plotting. Yeah, you know, they're
Speaker 3: not going to go to bed on time, They're not
Speaker 3: gonna want to go to school in the morning. Can't
Speaker 3: handle that kind of kind of revolutionary behavior.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's we go back to like the killing
Speaker 1: of the czar and his family. And I think it
Speaker 1: was absolutely justified to kill the czar and his wife, right,
Speaker 1: they had done sure, committed crimes against humanity, They had
Speaker 1: millions of deaths on their hands. What else are you
Speaker 1: supposed to do to those people? But when you kill
Speaker 1: their kids, And I've heard the counter argument that, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, these people had been so brutalized by the czars,
Speaker 1: if those kids were alive, they would have been a
Speaker 1: threat to the revolution. And like, I understand how that
Speaker 1: logic can take hold, But the unfortunate reality is when
Speaker 1: you start your revolution by murdering kids, you tend to
Speaker 1: keep murdering kids.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that wall has been broken down. Yeah, yeah, like
Speaker 3: that taboo no longer exists, even though it should. And
Speaker 3: like you know, there's troubling parts of history that were
Speaker 3: like you can simultaneously understand the motivations of a group
Speaker 3: of people while also saying, yeah, that was incredibly fucked yup.
Speaker 1: It's like Nat Turner's rebellion where they killed the children
Speaker 1: of slave owners, and it's like, I get where their
Speaker 1: heads are right to the extent that it's possible, but
Speaker 1: those kids didn't do anything because they're babies, you know,
Speaker 1: Like it's both of those things can be true. So,
Speaker 1: as is usually the case of this period of time,
Speaker 1: these corpses are tossed into mass graves and buried in secret,
Speaker 1: which is a deliberate provocation to the cultural values of
Speaker 1: the Georgian countryside in which Barria had been raised. Funerals
Speaker 1: are like this huge community endeavor, like where everybody gets
Speaker 1: together there. It is supposed to be a thing with
Speaker 1: a lot of ceremony to it. And so this is
Speaker 1: specifically like him kind of turning his back on a
Speaker 1: lot of the culture he had been raised in by
Speaker 1: wiping out these people and then denying them any kind
Speaker 1: of acknowledgment that they'd ever existed.
Speaker 3: You know that that's unsurprising because like the Soviet Union,
Speaker 3: as a whole is a project of Russian chauvinism, and
Speaker 3: as a Georgian man, he has to go above and
Speaker 3: beyond divorcing himself from his Georgian identity to advance in
Speaker 3: the culture.
Speaker 1: And that is definitely the argument you'll hear from a
Speaker 1: lot of writers, you know, especially ones who like are
Speaker 1: kind of writing more from the Georgian perspective about this guy.
Speaker 1: And it works, by the way, in terms of like
Speaker 1: us making his name right. This is his first foray
Speaker 1: into real mass killing, and Stalin takes note of the
Speaker 1: fact that, like, ah, this guy is a talented amateur.
Speaker 1: You know, we might want to bring this guy in
Speaker 1: a little bit, see how many more people he could kill?
Speaker 1: Voris But the sheer scale of your amateur how would
Speaker 1: you like to go pro? Yeah? How would you like
Speaker 1: to be the the Travis Kelcey of filling mass graves?
Speaker 1: Did I say name right? Zoviy nailed it. So the
Speaker 1: sheer scale of the violence necessitated some backpedaling from Moscow
Speaker 1: as well. In October of nineteen twenty four, they released
Speaker 1: a report from a commission which basically concluded that unreliable
Speaker 1: elements in the Cheka had gone too far. Some of
Speaker 1: these people were disappeared, but not Barria. For the next
Speaker 1: three years through nineteen twenty six, he would have his
Speaker 1: men shoot at least five hundred Communists who were allegedly
Speaker 1: too close to the old Minsheviks for the new regime's comfort.
Speaker 1: Barry was promoted in nineteen twenty six to chairman of
Speaker 1: the GPU, which is the current name that the secret
Speaker 1: police that had succeeded the Cheka were under. I'm still
Speaker 1: going to wind up calling them the check a sum.
Speaker 1: It's the GPU, now you get it. We don't need
Speaker 1: that same thing. It's the same deaf baby. He survived
Speaker 1: at least one assassination attempt, and, according to some accounts,
Speaker 1: rather heroically fired on the people trying to kill him
Speaker 1: to allow several other wounded chechists to escape. He receives
Speaker 1: an award for bravery. Who knows if this is true? Right,
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like him, because that sound like him. He
Speaker 1: also owed much of his success to the man who
Speaker 1: was his superior for a good chunk of this period,
Speaker 1: Sergo or Zonikids, who I will not be saying that
Speaker 1: last name anymore. We're gonna call him Sergo from now on.
Speaker 1: Sergo Sergo winds up in Moscow around nineteen twenty seven
Speaker 1: with this coveted position, right, like he's a He comes up,
Speaker 1: you know, from the sticks, essentially gets this job in Moscow,
Speaker 1: and he's close to Stalin, right, so he is going
Speaker 1: to be the first kind of prominent guy who's gonna
Speaker 1: feed praise, this like solid drip of praise about Barria
Speaker 1: to Stalin. And it's Sergo who ensures that Barria doesn't
Speaker 1: get punished for this massacre of the Mensheviks when a
Speaker 1: bunch of other people do. And in return, Barria is
Speaker 1: going to exhibit what's his primary and undeniable skill, which
Speaker 1: is kissing ass. Right, this man licks boots with the
Speaker 1: best of them, right, there are very few people have
Speaker 1: ever licked boots to more of a shine than fucking
Speaker 1: Larenti Barrier. He names his son Sergo after this. He
Speaker 1: sends in letters filled with oily praise, including lines like
Speaker 1: your trust in me gives me all my energy, initiative
Speaker 1: and ability to work. Without you, Sergo, I would have
Speaker 1: no one. You are more than a brother or father
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 3: You're my lover.
Speaker 1: Just like six pages of describing as cock follows, they
Speaker 1: just settled down and explored each other's Yeah yeah, then
Speaker 1: they get married.
Speaker 3: He's too old for LAVENTI.
Speaker 1: Mmmm, that is definitely true. Those same letters always included
Speaker 1: like in the midst of this, like oily praise rumors
Speaker 1: about the misbehavior of barious colleagues, like oh, I love
Speaker 1: you so much. You know, you're the light of You're
Speaker 1: my own personal Jesus, the light of my life. Also,
Speaker 1: let me tell you what this fucking dude in the
Speaker 1: office one over is doing. Right, And this is probably
Speaker 1: how he gets promoted to head the checka right because
Speaker 1: he throws his then boss under the bush. He always
Speaker 1: paints himself as an innocent. He would kind of describes
Speaker 1: himself as naive, like I would never have thought that
Speaker 1: my colleagues and the secret murder police would do secret murders.
Speaker 3: How could this happen? Kiddy, I'm just I'm just a
Speaker 3: little guy. I'm just a little funny lude.
Speaker 1: Now, obviously he's as corrupt as anybody else he's He
Speaker 1: acquires mansions and country homes during this period, often owned
Speaker 1: by his former superiors who he helped get merged.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's how you're gonna get got right, Lavrenti
Speaker 3: Berryer's boss. You just secured your datcha from you know,
Speaker 3: the People's Central Committee of Reassigning Dachas or whatever the fuck.
Speaker 3: And you know BARRYA comes over to visit, You're gonna
Speaker 3: put some fucking cabbage on the grill or some shit,
Speaker 3: and Barry's like, nice house, and then you have to
Speaker 3: be like shit, shit shit.
Speaker 1: Fuck uh speaking of nice houses. If you want to
Speaker 1: make your house nicer, buy whatever comes on next. You know,
Speaker 1: even if that's the Washington State Highway patrol by the fuckers.
Speaker 1: Put him in your living room.
Speaker 3: You know. See if that.
Speaker 1: Works, they might show open your living room, whether you
Speaker 1: buy them or not. If you live in Washington, it's
Speaker 1: never impossible.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 1: So the abuses that Barria and other high ranking men
Speaker 1: in Georgia carried out generated enough complaints that in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine, Stalin and Sergo ordered another committee investigation. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from Sangster's book here. Much of this
Speaker 1: may have been prompted by Barria's letters of criticism about
Speaker 1: senior men, but he himself was aware that the investigation
Speaker 1: might look towards him, and cleverly warned Sergo that everyone
Speaker 1: tended to blame him. It was in actute but crafty
Speaker 1: move of prophylactic self defense, pointing out that those under
Speaker 1: investigation would of course blame the GPU. In a letter
Speaker 1: to Sergo, he suggested that he should be transferred out
Speaker 1: of Georgia, undoubtedly seeking promotion, which is political mentor ignored.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand he shielded Barria from criticism.
Speaker 1: Hey man, I just want to let you know, everybody's
Speaker 1: gonna blame me for this shit I did. But it's
Speaker 1: these other guy's fault. I'm just this little guy.
Speaker 3: I arrested them. This is unfair. This is the worst
Speaker 3: kind of discrimination against me.
Speaker 1: Do we really want to live in a state where
Speaker 1: men can be punished simply for their actions the things
Speaker 1: they do?
Speaker 3: No, we fought against that.
Speaker 1: Now at the end of the nineteen twenties, this is
Speaker 1: before the great terror or the holodomor has kicked off, right,
Speaker 1: but an astute observer can see things ramping in that
Speaker 1: direction towards this period. During this period, one clear sign
Speaker 1: was the increasing brutality with which the regime treated peasants.
Speaker 1: A good deal of the theory that the branch of
Speaker 1: Marxist theory that these Bolsheviks are working under is focused
Speaker 1: on like urban factory workers, right, which is the center
Speaker 1: of Bolshevik power, right, rather than cities in the countryside.
Speaker 1: You can see some of this is the fact that
Speaker 1: in Ukraine there's this big anarchist revolution that controls a
Speaker 1: significant part of the land mass for a while, and
Speaker 1: why ends up fighting against the Red Army, right, And
Speaker 1: it's because these are peasants, right, Peasants tend towards more
Speaker 1: anarchists thought than they do towards this Bolshevik thought, because
Speaker 1: they're not all like laborers and factories, you know, right,
Speaker 1: And Georgia.
Speaker 3: Policies like adversely affect the normal everyday peasant, like they're
Speaker 3: not serfs anymore, but like, yeah, they are still kind.
Speaker 1: Of yeah, and you know, the Mensheviks had kind of
Speaker 1: been more popular with the peasantry in Georgia. And since
Speaker 1: the Mensheviks are dead or hiding at this point, and
Speaker 1: the peasantry it's not going to be in anybody's good books,
Speaker 1: who's in it?
Speaker 3: What would the peasantry support them when their only contact
Speaker 3: of them is the death squad showing up and wiping
Speaker 3: out villages, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's your primary interaction with the government. So barry
Speaker 1: A focuses on the peasantry next, massively escalating the confiscation
Speaker 1: of lands and shooting so many peasants that it provokes
Speaker 1: another uprising. And the idea here this is justified as
Speaker 1: you've got a bunch of peasants who have huge tracts
Speaker 1: of land, and there are some wealthy peasants with a
Speaker 1: lot of land and it's getting reappropriated. A lot of
Speaker 1: this is like people who are maybe middle class or
Speaker 1: people who just aren't Marxists, you know, but are not
Speaker 1: like wealthy peasants. Right, so everyone, you know, both people
Speaker 1: who own these vast tracts of land and also people
Speaker 1: who just have like a small farm. A lot of
Speaker 1: them get caught up in this and a lot of
Speaker 1: them get killed.
Speaker 3: And so then they say that they're all part of
Speaker 3: these you know.
Speaker 1: Yes ulocks or yeah they're coulocks. Yes, and this you know,
Speaker 1: this uprising that Baria kind of insights. It plays well
Speaker 1: with Stalin's Revolution from Above, which is a program to
Speaker 1: industrialize the country that involve the forcible confiscation of lands.
Speaker 1: Peasants were not happy selling their grain for the low
Speaker 1: prices mandated by the state. And thus the wealthiest of
Speaker 1: the peasants had to be wiped out. That's at least
Speaker 1: the justification at the top. In October of nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: just three point five percent of households in Georgia had
Speaker 1: been collectivized. A year later, more than sixty percent were
Speaker 1: This is a rapid change. You can only make a
Speaker 1: change like this through hideous, wild violence in Georgia. Barria
Speaker 1: was the man who orchestrated it. In one noteworthy case,
Speaker 1: he shut down and uprising by peasants by again promising like, hey,
Speaker 1: if you all go home, you'll get amnesty. And then
Speaker 1: I need to tell you what he does. Right, he
Speaker 1: shoots the fuckers. You know, Stalin loves all this. He
Speaker 1: grows closer to Barrier. But the unthinkable scale of the
Speaker 1: violence caused outrage across the Caucuses, and Stalin wrote an
Speaker 1: article in Pravda. And this article is generally known as
Speaker 1: the dizzy with Success article. And it's it's interesting get
Speaker 1: you see a lot about Stalin in this where he
Speaker 1: frames it. He starts by talking about, like the staggering
Speaker 1: success of the collectivization movement. Right, you know, we've done
Speaker 1: this so fast, no one guessed that we could have
Speaker 1: done it this fast and done it this well. What
Speaker 1: an incredible achievement. But then he goes on to note
Speaker 1: the successes have their seamy side, especially when they are
Speaker 1: attained with comparative ease unexpectedly. So to speak, such successes
Speaker 1: sometimes induce the spirit of vanity and conceit we can
Speaker 1: achieve anything, there's nothing we can't do. People not infrequently
Speaker 1: become intoxicated by such successes. They become dizzy with success,
Speaker 1: lose all sense of proportion and the capacity to understand realities.
Speaker 1: The article continues with a bunch of fun claims, like
Speaker 1: when Stalin claims that the success of collectivization rested entirely
Speaker 1: on the voluntary character of the collective farm movement. Right,
Speaker 1: we did this all and everyone volunteered to have their
Speaker 1: farms taken away, and then everybody clapped, and then everybody clapped.
Speaker 1: Now the real purpose of this article. It's framed as like,
Speaker 1: what a success, But he's slamming the brakes on the
Speaker 1: collectivization profit process because, like, it turns out that disrupting
Speaker 1: the way that all your food is made kind of
Speaker 1: causes problems. And this is again, you know, when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. This was framed as like a unique
Speaker 1: evil of the Soviet system, all of these famines caused
Speaker 1: by this collectivization. This is not wildly different from what
Speaker 1: the East India Company does in a capitalist terms in
Speaker 1: India in the late seventeen hundreds, which kills thirty million people.
Speaker 1: It's this idea where you get guys who are not farmers,
Speaker 1: who don't know shit, but are sure that the farmers
Speaker 1: are dumb ingrates who don't know the most efficient way
Speaker 1: to do things and change.
Speaker 3: Every about the top. But I'm sure you're doing it wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly, And when you do that with where
Speaker 1: all the food comes from, you're going to have issues,
Speaker 1: which is why they need to slam the brakes on
Speaker 1: this shit to an extent. Barria and his boss, Stalin's
Speaker 1: brother in law, a guy called Reddens, wrote another letter
Speaker 1: blaming a bunch of other officers in his Aerbijan and
Speaker 1: Armenia and Georgia for the brutality of collectivization and the
Speaker 1: fact that it had caused shortages and stuff like tea
Speaker 1: night writes quote Baria and Reddins painted a grim picture
Speaker 1: of the situation in the Transcaucasian countryside deliberately exaggerating the
Speaker 1: extent of anti Soviet rioting and protests. Apparently they felt
Speaker 1: that the GPU had not been given enough leverage to
Speaker 1: suppress these actions because they claimed that the situation was
Speaker 1: exacerbated by the mildness of the authorities and dealing with
Speaker 1: the Kulaks and other rebels, which is very cop brained.
Speaker 3: Shit.
Speaker 1: Wow, all the brutality we did add consequences. It's probably
Speaker 1: because we weren't allowed to be brutal enough. You know,
Speaker 1: that would have solved it.
Speaker 3: We would have truly been able to bring the hammer
Speaker 3: down and secure this place if it wasn't for woke.
Speaker 1: If it wasn't for the woke peasantry. I guess so
Speaker 1: shortly thereafter, Barry is gonna throw Raidens under the bus too.
Speaker 1: He claims that Reddins had smashed down the door of
Speaker 1: a female colleague's home and had drunken rage and gotten
Speaker 1: so hammered that he walked home naked. He makes a
Speaker 1: lot of claims about how like drunken and abusive this
Speaker 1: guy is. They all may have been true, right, you know, sure,
Speaker 1: Whether or not it is, though, doesn't matter. What matters
Speaker 1: is that it worked. Stalin transferred Reddins, and by November
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty, Barria was a member of the Georgian
Speaker 1: Central Committee. By this point, he's also a friend to
Speaker 1: Stalin's Another assassination attempt may have contributed to the growing romance.
Speaker 1: There's a story that like a gunman tries to kill
Speaker 1: Stalin and barr A shields him with his body, may
Speaker 1: or may not have been true.
Speaker 3: Who knows? Does that sound like Barria?
Speaker 1: Also though it would sound like Barria to have a
Speaker 1: guy try to shoot Stalin like so he can throw
Speaker 1: his body in front of the leader right to like orchestra.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Hi, yeah, fake gun?
Speaker 3: Who knows?
Speaker 1: By late nineteen thirty, Barria was a regular visitor from
Speaker 1: to Stalin's vacation home in Sochi. He's not in the
Speaker 1: inner circle yet, He's not hanging out and drinking and
Speaker 1: eating with Stalin every day. He's not living in Moscow, right,
Speaker 1: but he like starts going to Sochi, which is where
Speaker 1: Stalin has his vacation house every summer, and he actually
Speaker 1: like in order to justify always being there, he gives
Speaker 1: himself the job of handling security for Stalin's Datcha. He's
Speaker 1: basically like your current guys. You can't trust him. They're
Speaker 1: not safe enough. You know, I'll do this job. And
Speaker 1: once he's in charge of security, he's got an excuse
Speaker 1: to kind of always be hanging around getting FaceTime with
Speaker 1: the big boss.
Speaker 3: Right, it's a great security guy you have on your datcha.
Speaker 3: It'd be a shame if you went missing.
Speaker 1: He died, must not have been great at security. Let
Speaker 1: me take take over here. So tragically, Yeah, he in
Speaker 1: an accident. He fell down six flights of stairs and
Speaker 1: shut himself twice in the back of that A yeah,
Speaker 1: right into a pair of bullets.
Speaker 3: Tragic.
Speaker 1: We got to stop keeping these things at the bottom
Speaker 1: of staircases. Stalin responded by rapidly promoting Barria to first
Speaker 1: Secretary in Georgia and second Secretary of the trans Caucasus
Speaker 1: Central Committee. By the age of thirty two, Barria was
Speaker 1: one of the most prominent young leaders in the whole USSR.
Speaker 1: Now I should note that nineteen thirty two to thirty
Speaker 1: three were the years in Ukraine that came to be
Speaker 1: known as the Hole of doomor This was all part
Speaker 1: of the anti Koulock forced collectivization efforts in Ukraine, which
Speaker 1: were similar but much more brutal to the ones that
Speaker 1: Baria carried out in Georgia. Baria killed thousands, maybe more.
Speaker 1: The Hola Doomor kills between three and a half to
Speaker 1: five million Ukrainians. Right, yeah, I think we're we're going
Speaker 1: to get a super precise death toll because of how
Speaker 1: it's carried out. But it is a hideous, hideous time
Speaker 1: and I don't mean to be papering over it. It's
Speaker 1: just it doesn't really deal directly with Barria. It doesn't
Speaker 1: that he is doing a lot of the same stuff
Speaker 1: to Georgia, but obviously it does not lead to the
Speaker 1: same death toll in Georgia that it does in Ukraine. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the whole thing, the Holodomor is awful enough that it
Speaker 1: reaches the ears of Stalin's wife, Nadya al Yeva, one
Speaker 1: of the few people in his life who could safely
Speaker 1: talk shit about other people to Stalin, and she becomes
Speaker 1: aware also of the shit that Barry has been doing,
Speaker 1: and she starts talking to Stalin and being like, this guy,
Speaker 1: you can't trust him, right, this is a bad man.
Speaker 1: He's doing like a lot of really brutal stuff. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because like one of the things that has
Speaker 1: happened in this period of time is that by the
Speaker 1: late twenties, she's grown tired of being locked away in
Speaker 1: the Kremlin with the other wives of powerful men. And
Speaker 1: because of again, one of the real accomplishments of the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union is that women's rights improved dramatically to where
Speaker 1: they had been in the Tzaris period. Now we are
Speaker 1: not saying there's any kind of real equality, but it's
Speaker 1: much better than it had been under the Csars. And
Speaker 1: because the new Soviet woman was supposed to have agency,
Speaker 1: was supposed to be able to career, Nadya's like, look, Stalin,
Speaker 1: I'm not just gonna stay in the fucking krimlin being
Speaker 1: your wife. I want to go get learned to do something.
Speaker 1: And so she goes and becomes a chemistry student. She
Speaker 1: enrolls in college. Now the students that she's becoming friends
Speaker 1: with don't really know who she is. They certainly don't
Speaker 1: know that she's Stalin's wife, Otherwise they would not have
Speaker 1: been saying some of the things that they start to
Speaker 1: say to Nadia.
Speaker 3: You contevited over to a house party with your Like,
Speaker 3: your friend's at your friend's house and it's like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is this is my husband, like you look from
Speaker 3: oh fuck, oh no, oh, no, gotta go. I really
Speaker 3: don't to watch cowboy movies. I really gotta go.
Speaker 1: New contact with young students brought Nadia information about the
Speaker 1: reality behind the Holy domor and the bloodshed that had
Speaker 1: backed up her husband's collectivization policy. She went to Stalin
Speaker 1: eventually and told him he was butchering the people. Stalin
Speaker 1: responded by arresting her new friends, or rather he had
Speaker 1: Barriya arrest her new friends, and Nadya fell into a
Speaker 1: deep depression, eventually taking her own life. As shitty a
Speaker 1: husband as he was, he seems to have loved maybe
Speaker 1: the wrong word, but like after she dies, it is
Speaker 1: generally agreed that things get a lot darker with Stalin.
Speaker 1: He gets a lot crueler. It does fuck him up
Speaker 1: to some extent. I don't know how you want to
Speaker 1: translate that in terms of love or not, but it
Speaker 1: has an impact on him.
Speaker 3: Maybe the closest thing Stalin was capable of fondness for
Speaker 3: another year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that seems to be the case. The fringe group
Speaker 1: slash cult around Stalin and the Kremlin increasingly shuts out
Speaker 1: the rest of the world after this point, as she
Speaker 1: Liftitzpatrick rights, he socialized largely with the team, and their
Speaker 1: kremlin apartments are out at his datcha. This was true
Speaker 1: in the early days of the team, when his wife
Speaker 1: Nadya was alive and he and many of his colleagues
Speaker 1: had young children, and continued after Nadya's suicide in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty two, when the team and his in laws from
Speaker 1: two marriages provided virtually all of his social life, which
Speaker 1: focused around his datcha. He was a lonely man after
Speaker 1: Nadya's death, and even lonelier after the Great Purges broke
Speaker 1: up his surrogate family of in laws. His daughters Sveetlana
Speaker 1: was left for company, but that ended when she grew
Speaker 1: up and married during the war. The company of the
Speaker 1: team became all the more important to Stalin after the war,
Speaker 1: and participants have left memorable accounts of the awfulness of
Speaker 1: enforced nightly socializing at the datcha now in contrast to
Speaker 1: the thirties without wives and children, and the burden it
Speaker 1: imposed on the team. That's kind of, you know, Sheila's
Speaker 1: account of sort of how shit with Stalin shifts, But
Speaker 1: you see, some things are always true, which is that
Speaker 1: he is always isolated with this group of people, this
Speaker 1: ever kind of shrinking circle of people, and when Nadia
Speaker 1: is alive in the early days, it's a broader circle.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have total power over everyone, yet he's not
Speaker 1: killing everyone he has a disagreement with, and increasingly after
Speaker 1: the case with her, some people will argue this feeds
Speaker 1: in a lot to the great terror. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much credence you want to give that, but it
Speaker 1: is generally agreed that he becomes darker and crueler after
Speaker 1: her death and also lonely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, his circle is growing increasingly smaller, more insular,
Speaker 3: and his last real connection with you know what you
Speaker 3: consider normal people being students that his wife went to
Speaker 3: school with, where you know he considered treason us whatever
Speaker 3: it was, they said. So I can only imagine the
Speaker 3: horrific feedback loop that happens in these dudes. Dudes weekends
Speaker 3: out of the datcha.
Speaker 1: It doesn't these do not get to be more fun
Speaker 1: as parties. Yeah, no, much worse parties.
Speaker 3: They've graduated from being like the fun happy drunk or
Speaker 3: like dude who doing club drugs or whatever, to like, yeah,
Speaker 3: the dude doing Heroin in a dark basement alone.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, So Barry is again not yet a member
Speaker 1: of Stalin's close friends circle, nor again is he a
Speaker 1: factor in the Holy Duomoor. He is strictly a regional
Speaker 1: leader at this point, and that would not do for
Speaker 1: a man of his ambition. He is, however, close to Stalin,
Speaker 1: a trusted tody, and he's going to be working at
Speaker 1: getting into that inner circle, which he knows is going
Speaker 1: to require living in and around the Krimlin. So Barry
Speaker 1: has set himself up to slide into position there the
Speaker 1: only way he knew how, with his unparalleled skill in
Speaker 1: boot looking and also his willingness to commit murder. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four he was elected to full membership of
Speaker 1: the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and this marks
Speaker 1: his entry as a national level figure in the USSR.
Speaker 1: And we're going to cover what happens after that. But first, Joe,
Speaker 1: you know, who's not a national level figure in the USSR.
Speaker 3: I would assume the advertisers of products and services available
Speaker 3: to us, it would be weird if they were right.
Speaker 1: It would be it would be weird if they were,
Speaker 1: you know, so famously.
Speaker 3: Central Factory number sixteen. Yeah, what was it, Blata? I
Speaker 3: forget which car they made?
Speaker 1: Oh fuck yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll have to have
Speaker 1: to cut in the right name for that fucking car. Anyway,
Speaker 1: buy a fucking car. Here's some ads. Ah, we're back.
Speaker 1: So nineteen thirty four, Barria is in the Central Committee
Speaker 1: of the Communist Party. He is now finally out of
Speaker 1: the caucuses. You know, there are protests about his promotion
Speaker 1: within the party because a lot of people know Barria
Speaker 1: is a dangerous creep. At this point, a number of
Speaker 1: high ranking official sin stolen letters that are like, this
Speaker 1: guy is a maniac, please don't promote him. And stalin
Speaker 1: the caucuses. Yeah yeah, Stala does not listen. Barria sets
Speaker 1: to work, probably because they don't like him, purging every
Speaker 1: other leader in the trans Caucasus region who might act
Speaker 1: as a barrier to his rise.
Speaker 3: And this means he's.
Speaker 1: Killing all of the veteran communist organizers who would like
Speaker 1: brought the revolution to the Caucases in the first place.
Speaker 1: You know, that is again we talk about it, and
Speaker 1: to be fair, even most of like the tankies I know,
Speaker 1: will say that Barria was a piece of shit. Now
Speaker 1: I think they go too far and saying like everything
Speaker 1: bad that happened during Stalin was Barria. You know, you
Speaker 1: do run into that sometimes, But like I have occasionally
Speaker 1: come into like people who try to rehabilitate Barria. I
Speaker 1: think they are in a minority even within that set,
Speaker 1: because again, all the people he's murdering are good Bolsheviks, right,
Speaker 1: like y that is his primary victim here, well and
Speaker 1: a bunch of peasants, right, But he does kill like
Speaker 1: all of these people who had.
Speaker 3: Done the revolution, you.
Speaker 1: Know, started from the bottom. Now you're dead, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: In his Arabijan, he also presides over a massive increase
Speaker 1: in the productivity of oil wells in the Caucasus. In
Speaker 1: Stalin's personal life, he becomes a gopher, using his position
Speaker 1: as head of the Soshi security to repeatedly visit and
Speaker 1: do small favors for his boss. He becomes like Setlana's
Speaker 1: babysitter from time to time. Oh that's creepy in retrost, Yeah,
Speaker 1: horrible babysitter.
Speaker 3: Do not let Lavrenti Barrio watch your kid, you know,
Speaker 3: not good. No, no, don't do that.
Speaker 1: Night, writes quote. Photos of Barria and Sveetlana taken when
Speaker 1: the latter was young convey a proprietary manner on Barria's part.
Speaker 1: In one photographs, Fetlana, who appears to be about nine
Speaker 1: or ten years old, is perched uncomfortably on Barria's lap.
Speaker 1: Judging from her expression, she did not enjoy being in
Speaker 1: his possessive grasp, particularly at her age.
Speaker 3: Who would who would?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Only, But there's never been a human being that's enjoyed
Speaker 3: the touch of Larenti Berry.
Speaker 1: No, no, and like, look, she is analyzing a photograph.
Speaker 1: That's not a thing you can say objectively. But having
Speaker 1: looked at those photographs, she Svetlana does not look like
Speaker 1: she wants to be on that lap.
Speaker 3: Not a fan. There's not many laps I would like
Speaker 3: to be on, but I specially wouldn't want to be
Speaker 3: on Larenty Berry's lap.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, just lee pace. So the closer he
Speaker 1: got to Stalin, the more Barrier came to understand his boss,
Speaker 1: and particularly the fact that he was a massive narcissist.
Speaker 1: Right at the seventeenth party congress, Stalin had received fewer
Speaker 1: votes to continue heading the party than he had expected.
Speaker 1: Now he still easily wins reelection, but the fact that
Speaker 1: he doesn't win it by as much as he had
Speaker 1: thought he would.
Speaker 3: Triggers.
Speaker 1: If you know anything about Jay Stall, pretty paranoid guy,
Speaker 1: and this really really jacks his paranoia gland into overdrive.
Speaker 1: The boss begins to rant about Dubbert double dealers within
Speaker 1: the party and complains to Barria that he stood alone.
Speaker 1: Barrier responded by making himself head of Stalin's unofficial but
Speaker 1: actually very official cult of personality sangster rights. Barria ensured
Speaker 1: Stalin's picture appeared everywhere and arranged a new monument over
Speaker 1: Stalin's birthplace in Gory. He even went so far in
Speaker 1: the subsequious behavior to bring Stalin's mother to Tbilisi, where
Speaker 1: he and his wife took care of her. When Stalin
Speaker 1: visited his mother in nineteen thirty five, it was with
Speaker 1: her career Baria. He was making every conceivable effort to
Speaker 1: ingratiate himself in the leader's eyes and behaved like a
Speaker 1: courtier looking after a dowager impress. He takes care of
Speaker 1: his mom for him. He becomes a nurse for Stalin's
Speaker 1: mom to get in on his good side. That is
Speaker 1: ace level toadying man. That is like some mister Smithers
Speaker 1: shit dedication to the craft. Yeah, you have to respect
Speaker 1: the toadying. Yeah, what if Smithers had a hell of
Speaker 1: a body count? Yeah right, Like what if Smithers was
Speaker 1: killing people left and right?
Speaker 3: We don't know that he wasn't.
Speaker 1: We Yeah, it is kind of implied in a couple
Speaker 1: of episodes, that is true. Yeah, despite being Georgian himself,
Speaker 1: Stalin had not been a very significant part of organizing
Speaker 1: actual Bolshevik groups in Georgia. Right, this is not where
Speaker 1: he is primarily active, and he is profoundly insecure about
Speaker 1: this fact, and in fact hated the Georgian communists who
Speaker 1: had actually done that work, particularly though he hated the
Speaker 1: Marxist historians who insisted on writing accurate histories of the
Speaker 1: Bolshevik movements and the Caucuses. That is not fuckers, You
Speaker 1: want to talk about an unsafe job writing accurate histories
Speaker 1: of Bolshevik organizing in the caucases in nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 3: Right, you do not want to be doing that, bro
Speaker 3: I flink Russian Roulette with your own citations. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This starts in late nineteen thirty one, when Stalin
Speaker 1: himself wrote a letter to an academic journ to complain
Speaker 1: about an article critical of Lenin written by a historian
Speaker 1: with the incredible last name Slutski, spelled exactly like you'd hope,
Speaker 1: exactly like amazing last name. Dude's wrong, sounds like you
Speaker 1: like it literally sounds like you're accusing him of being
Speaker 1: a slut and being a little racist against Russians. But
Speaker 1: that's just his name. Amazing stuff. Barry It took note
Speaker 1: of this, and he launched a series of attacks in
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen thirties against historians who had written histories
Speaker 1: that didn't center Stalin. One of these guys later had
Speaker 1: to go before the Party of Congress and apologize for
Speaker 1: leaving Stalin out. In a very funny turn of phrase,
Speaker 1: he claimed that when he'd written the book, Stalin's role
Speaker 1: in the Bolshevik movements in the CAUCUSUS quote had not
Speaker 1: yet come to light.
Speaker 3: We were telling this light. Yeah, when I wrote the book,
Speaker 3: you didn't give me the cliff notes of your last
Speaker 3: cult meeting. I didn't know I was supposed to fake this.
Speaker 3: That is so fucking funny. You love to see it,
Speaker 3: Oh my god. So published public challenges and attacks against
Speaker 3: objective historians, many of whom were purged later. He also
Speaker 3: hired a writer or writers to author a history book,
Speaker 3: which he took credit for. The book had the banger
Speaker 3: title on the History of Bolshevik Organizations in trans Caucasia,
Speaker 3: which I don't know, Joe, you and I are both
Speaker 3: title guys. I don't call that a good one. No,
Speaker 3: I mean maybe like a mid level, like young adult book.
Speaker 1: Sure I would have used the title what's Transcaucasian my Bolsheviks?
Speaker 1: You know, that's pithy, that's got some that's got some
Speaker 1: bounce to it. Right, So this book pausits a holy
Speaker 1: new view of Bolshevik history, wherein Stalin was the main
Speaker 1: organizer and figurehead of the Bolshevik movements in Armenia, Georgia
Speaker 1: and to Zerbaijan. Now the book is fucking nonsense, as
Speaker 1: this passage by Night makes clear. Barria attributed to him
Speaker 1: an incredibly active role in practical revolutionary work at the
Speaker 1: time that he was still a student. Thus, various books
Speaker 1: stated that an eighteen ninety eight Stalin led no fewer
Speaker 1: than eight workers circles. By the seventh edition, the number
Speaker 1: was increased to eleven, and also organized a large railway strike.
Speaker 1: As the historian Bertram Wolf observed, These were rather remarkable feats,
Speaker 1: considering that Stalin was enrolled at the Tifless Seminary, where
Speaker 1: students were virtually kept under lock and key. Barius claim
Speaker 1: did not accord with earlier accounts about the same time period,
Speaker 1: including one given by Stalin himself. Barrious History asserted that
Speaker 1: Stalin was leading a large movement. In fact, the Georgian
Speaker 1: social democratic movement was overwhelmingly menshevik, and, as one observer
Speaker 1: pointed out, Stalin had only a small following quote. He
Speaker 1: succeeded in gaining only a few adherents, rarely more than
Speaker 1: ten supporters, whom he would quickly organize into groups or clusters,
Speaker 1: giving immediately the grand title of committee.
Speaker 3: So that rules so hard. It's like very group of historians,
Speaker 3: and Barrius slides this book up in front of you.
Speaker 3: He's like, go ahead, prove you wrong. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: fucking dare you. Yeah, let's do some peer review.
Speaker 1: Guys, what do you think Nobody even cracks the first page?
Speaker 1: Like looks good, boss, it's good, good stuff, good stuff,
Speaker 1: red stamped. You need a jacket, quote, need a blurb?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And why didn't you just write it and sign my
Speaker 1: name to it? We're good and again. So you know today,
Speaker 1: if you were doing this in a revolution, you would
Speaker 1: just use chat GBT to generate because no one's gonna
Speaker 1: read this fucking thing. To generate your bullshit book about
Speaker 1: how Stalin did everything. In this case, you had to
Speaker 1: get ghost writers. And Barry would later say there were
Speaker 1: multiple ghost writers. He says this when he's like being tortured. Basically,
Speaker 1: so who knows.
Speaker 3: How many there were.
Speaker 1: It's generally agreed that at least one of the guys
Speaker 1: who wrote this book was a real writer, not a
Speaker 1: his story and just a writer named Badilla. B Edia
Speaker 1: is the anglicization and this guy. So BARRYA has Bedia
Speaker 1: write this book for him, and then he has him
Speaker 1: shot in nineteen thirty seven. He's a great purchase of
Speaker 1: cover to kill his ghost. He makes him a literal
Speaker 1: ghost writer.
Speaker 3: Nobody tell James Patterson this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think James Patterson is already doing this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: great work on the Pelican Brief.
Speaker 3: Three.
Speaker 1: Why don't you come into my office for a second.
Speaker 1: Turn you back, look out this window. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: rummage around in my desk for a second. If you
Speaker 1: hear a click, don't don't stop looking out the window.
Speaker 3: Close that suspiciously thick door behind you when you come in. Please.
Speaker 1: Now, the book is a huge hit, by which I
Speaker 1: mean Stalin liked it, and so everyone else had to
Speaker 1: pretend it was great and buy a copy, which you know,
Speaker 1: I have considered becoming the center of a revolutionary movement,
Speaker 1: murdering my enemies, and becoming the totalitarian ruler of a state,
Speaker 1: because it would really be good for my book salesman.
Speaker 3: That is how I'll finally secure my nebula is. Yeah,
Speaker 3: is creating a personality call.
Speaker 1: All of the other writers are dead. Congratulations, you have
Speaker 1: no choice about one vote?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it does great. And this is you know,
Speaker 1: Stalin likes this a lot. This is maybe the biggest
Speaker 1: thing Barria does for him in this period, even more
Speaker 1: than the murders, because Stalin is a weird egomaniac. But
Speaker 1: Stalin also he never wants to give any of his
Speaker 1: minions too much praise, So after thanking Barrier for this,
Speaker 1: he has the polit Bureau reprimand Barrier for republishing some
Speaker 1: of Stalin's old writing without getting permission, basically like a
Speaker 1: copyright violation.
Speaker 3: Revolutionary megging.
Speaker 1: It is so funny, Starting in nineteen thirty six, the
Speaker 1: same year the terror began, Barria launched his own regional
Speaker 1: cult of personality. He starts naming everything he can across
Speaker 1: the Caucasus after himself, from movie theaters to farms to
Speaker 1: sports stadiums. His portrait gets put in schools and governments
Speaker 1: buildings across the area. Newspapers start putting out regular articles
Speaker 1: about all the great shit he's doing, and Barria follows
Speaker 1: this with a slurry of new articles rewriting Stalin's history
Speaker 1: and thus the history of the whole revolution. He was
Speaker 1: not a particularly revolutionary thinker himself self, and his decision
Speaker 1: to do this was basically, He's not like even inventing
Speaker 1: propaganda for Stalin. He's copying less successful Soviet propagandists who
Speaker 1: were just worse at toadying than them. He's like plagiarizing
Speaker 1: other boot lickors, but just better at it. They can't
Speaker 1: give him the Soviet version of a copyright strike if
Speaker 1: they're all dead. That's right, that's right, Yeah, that's fucking
Speaker 1: where Sam Altman's heading. Barry was able to get away
Speaker 1: with this because by nineteen thirty six he had become
Speaker 1: one of the few pillars of Stalin's emotional support. This
Speaker 1: is a difficult time for Jay stall the mid late night,
Speaker 1: early late nineteen thirty emotional support area. Yeah, my emotional
Speaker 1: support mass murderer, this is my comfort checkist. So it
Speaker 1: is a tough time for Stalin. Trotzky is still alive
Speaker 1: in a broadened exile at this point and has called
Speaker 1: for his removal. Stalin started facing more internal resistance within
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union because the economy kind of in the
Speaker 1: shitter right now, right, you know, it turns out doing
Speaker 1: a starvation genocide not great for food production or economics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you burn your area known as like the empire. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I burned this to the ground. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like Ukraine is so valuable in that sense
Speaker 1: that like the Nazis are willing to risk everything to
Speaker 1: have it, and Stalin and his friends just light it
Speaker 1: on fire.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can't kill everybody if we kill everybody first. Yes, Oh, we'll.
Speaker 1: Show you killing everybody. In the late nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: Sergei Kirov, a popular and powerful politician who becomes the
Speaker 1: namesake of the Kirov Warship and Red Alert Too, one
Speaker 1: of the better Red Alert games, was assassinated. Kirov had
Speaker 1: been close to Stalin, but he's also he's one of
Speaker 1: these he's kind of one of the last guys in
Speaker 1: Stalin's inner circle that everybody really likes, right, Like Kirov
Speaker 1: is just like really popular. He's I think he was
Speaker 1: probably just a cool.
Speaker 3: Dude to hag out, that's why he had to go.
Speaker 1: But he's killed mysteriously, and like, there are theories that
Speaker 1: it was Stalin who did it. Most of the historians
Speaker 1: I've read think that that probably isn't what happened, but
Speaker 1: it's not impossible because of how popular he is. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't be against Stalin's later behavior to have this guy.
Speaker 3: Right, there can't be a cool guy in the girl.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's also some people will say Barrier probably kills Kiirrov,
Speaker 1: maybe on Stalin's orders, Maybe he's doing it for himself.
Speaker 1: We don't really know, right This is still a mystery today.
Speaker 1: You can read a bunch of theories on it. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not competent to say what's most likely.
Speaker 1: But he's dead, and this is going This causes a
Speaker 1: huge uproar from one thing, because this guy is so
Speaker 1: popular and so powerful. There's legitimate paranoia on behalf of
Speaker 1: everyone that's Stalin or the people around him, like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: who's next, Right, they can get kirof you know, assuming
Speaker 1: Stalin didn't do it. Stalin's literally like kind of scared
Speaker 1: because they were able to kill Kiov.
Speaker 3: You know, we don't really know.
Speaker 1: But the which is what the secret police go by
Speaker 1: at this point, spins nineteen thirty five, carrying out an investigation,
Speaker 1: by which I mean they torture a shitload of people
Speaker 1: until said people admit that they had been plotting to
Speaker 1: kill Stalin, and that's how Kirov got murdered. Right, It's
Speaker 1: unclear if there was really a plot. There may have been.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be weird if there had been a plot
Speaker 1: to kill Stalin.
Speaker 3: All right, fucking people are always plotting, right exactly.
Speaker 1: But this is the pretext that Stalin needs to tell
Speaker 1: the NKVD to really ramp up the mass arrests and
Speaker 1: murder of everyone who'd ever looked at him. Funny, now,
Speaker 1: Kirov's death came at a great time for Stalin. The
Speaker 1: economic collapse that followed collectivization had done a lot of
Speaker 1: damage to his standing and to the Soviet Union, and
Speaker 1: in some ways, the Great Terror comes out of the
Speaker 1: like you could also, you could, you could, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people do so basically say that the terror
Speaker 1: kind of starts in the reaction to Kirov's assassination, right,
Speaker 1: That's what gets the balls rolling that become the great Terror,
Speaker 1: And in some ways it's a great distraction campaign from
Speaker 1: the problem that Stalin's government is having at this period
Speaker 1: of time, and it also allows him to consolidate his power,
Speaker 1: which is a big part of why so many people
Speaker 1: think he killed care Off, right, because like, well it
Speaker 1: kind of it kind of works out for him. But
Speaker 1: like as we all know with nine to eleven, things
Speaker 1: can work out great for a mass murdering piece of shit,
Speaker 1: and they didn't necessarily start the process.
Speaker 3: Yeah, something can blow up in your face and you
Speaker 3: still take advantage.
Speaker 1: Of it, Yeah, exactly. And these guys are all the
Speaker 1: only reason these people are alive is they're skilled opportunists
Speaker 1: like Stalin and Maria are both very good at taking
Speaker 1: opportunity of events that occur. You know, starting in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty six, the NKVD begins jailing and killing people who
Speaker 1: had been influential Bolsheviks. A lot of them were people
Speaker 1: who had just been close to Stalin like anyone who
Speaker 1: had been his friend that he knew well in previous periods.
Speaker 1: He kills a lot of people just because they knew
Speaker 1: too much about him, right at least, that's kind of
Speaker 1: the way you'll hear this described. A lot of them
Speaker 1: wind up in camps, the infamous Gulags, and the only
Speaker 1: people who are spared are kind of his current friend group,
Speaker 1: guys like Molotov and Kaganovitch. Right now, I say spared,
Speaker 1: but it's worth noting even the guys that he's close
Speaker 1: to who don't get killed or imprisoned often get charged
Speaker 1: with something. At some Pointachslav Molotov is indicted for the
Speaker 1: killing of Kirov, right And I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: because Stalin legitimately didn't trust him for a while, or
Speaker 1: if he's like he did with Barria when he like
Speaker 1: gives the copyright strike to him, if he just wanted
Speaker 1: to make sure Molotov wasn't too comfortable.
Speaker 3: Right, So there's appear to know his place that right here,
Speaker 3: you might be the foreign minister, but you're not untouchable.
Speaker 1: And he's not at this point, by the way, the
Speaker 1: foreign minister. Yet we are we will be talking about
Speaker 1: that process. But like Molotov gets indicted for killing Kirov
Speaker 1: for a while, but then he gets dropped from the
Speaker 1: indictment and when he comes back into favor, he's added in.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, he was like, oh, they were going to
Speaker 1: kill Molotov. You know, that's how Molotov knows that things
Speaker 1: are okay. When he gets added to the list of
Speaker 1: potential victims, they.
Speaker 3: Get to wreckon his personal history that you know, it's
Speaker 3: a Molotov rebuild.
Speaker 1: Like you can't make other except for the horrible body count.
Speaker 1: Like it's all really funny, Like these are the Stalin
Speaker 1: and his inner circle are the messiest bitches in history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing. It's the cruelty of the absurd and
Speaker 3: the absurdity of cruelty in one incredibly annoying group of dickheads.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to me that like as horrible. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's just because he didn't get all that long in power.
Speaker 1: Hitler's in power a little more than a third of
Speaker 1: the time that Stalin's in power, right like twelve years,
Speaker 1: you know, Stalin's like thirty. It's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: like Hitler has the Night of Long Knives, he does
Speaker 1: have that one big spade of purges. And then maybe
Speaker 1: it's just because the war starts so soon after and
Speaker 1: he really can't afford it. But like he doesn't, we
Speaker 1: don't have the same kind of purges of Hitler's friends
Speaker 1: that you get, people fall out of favor, they lose jobs.
Speaker 1: But he doesn't do the same thing Stalin does in
Speaker 1: terms of like absolute clean sweep, And maybe it's just
Speaker 1: because you know, the war is on and he can't
Speaker 1: really afford to start massacre his.
Speaker 3: Friends like that. He also like targeted purges, I mean,
Speaker 3: especially like after the assassination attempt with and then yeah
Speaker 3: you know he yeah, yeah, yeah, a ton of people,
Speaker 3: and then even people he was kind of remotely suspicious of,
Speaker 3: like Rommel, for example. He's never been completely solidified if
Speaker 3: he was in a right not a little unclear. And
Speaker 3: Hitler's always was very very jealous of him because of
Speaker 3: how popular it was. He's like, no, man, you've got
Speaker 3: to kill yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I kind of do think that if Hitler had like
Speaker 1: either hadn't done World War Two and had stayed in
Speaker 1: power or had somehow won, like he would have wound
Speaker 1: up doing a lot of this stuff himself.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, you.
Speaker 1: Probably because he was intensely pid right right, and everyone
Speaker 1: around him is a piece of shit, you know, so
Speaker 1: kind of what comes out of this period one of
Speaker 1: the things that happens to all these people who are
Speaker 1: close to Stalin. If you want to survive, part of
Speaker 1: how you solidify your position and make yourself not seem
Speaker 1: suspicious is to go after your friends in close colleagues,
Speaker 1: the people that you like most and rely on your
Speaker 1: subordinates and coworkers, the people that you like, not just
Speaker 1: like somebod who works in the same office, but the
Speaker 1: guy that you're really relying on to do a lot
Speaker 1: of work, right, the people who are best at their jobs.
Speaker 1: That's who you're going to give up for execution. And
Speaker 1: in part of it, that's how you show your loyalties.
Speaker 1: Like this guy's my fucking brother in law. He's great
Speaker 1: at his job. I just had him shot in the
Speaker 1: back of the head.
Speaker 3: For you, buddy. You know, that's how loyal I am. Right.
Speaker 1: What independence the Politbureau had had faded away at this point. Terrified,
Speaker 1: they passed a resolution to permit torture during interrogations, which
Speaker 1: was already common. There are field executions ordered by the NKVD,
Speaker 1: and they start assigning arrest quotas in nineteen thirty seven
Speaker 1: using the same troika system originally pioneered by the Cheka.
Speaker 1: So like this the same way Barry is doing shit
Speaker 1: in Georgia in his early career. This becomes how the
Speaker 1: Great Terror is executed.
Speaker 3: And previous to the.
Speaker 1: Great Terror, the Bolsheviks had had a lot of people purged. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we were just talking about that. It had generally not
Speaker 1: been the thing, particularly in like Russia, to go after
Speaker 1: old Bolsheviks, right if you did, they were kind of
Speaker 1: like forced out of jobs, but you wouldn't execute them, right.
Speaker 1: It happens sometimes, but not in mass. This is when
Speaker 1: they start mass executing old Bolsheviks, right like even within
Speaker 1: sort of like the center of Russia, and somewhere between
Speaker 1: about a million and two million people are executed or
Speaker 1: worked to death in gulags by the time the Great
Speaker 1: Terror ends in nineteen thirty eight. It's worth noting that
Speaker 1: a major factor in the Terror is anti Semitism. About
Speaker 1: a third of the NKVD was Jewish before the Great Terror.
Speaker 1: Many of these people are massacred and replaced with Georgians
Speaker 1: and Russians by nineteen thirty nine, only about four percent
Speaker 1: of NKVD officers are Jewish.
Speaker 3: Similar purge, whatt and fucking bullets.
Speaker 1: Those guys theres and you have to assume very canny,
Speaker 1: right like that four percent. Those are some tough scents
Speaker 1: of bitches. They had to throw a lot of people
Speaker 1: under the bus to not get killed themselves. A similar
Speaker 1: purge takes place in the Red Army, not just of Jews,
Speaker 1: but of most of the officer class. Fifteen of sixteen
Speaker 1: Army commanders are arrested, and like it's worth noting because
Speaker 1: of what a shit show the Red Army is in
Speaker 1: the invasion of Finland and in the initial the first
Speaker 1: year and change of like the of World War two,
Speaker 1: after Operation Barbarossa, it has this reputation is being a
Speaker 1: total mess until like it gets rebuilt under guys like
Speaker 1: Zukov during the war. Right, that's not really the accurate.
Speaker 1: The Red Army that Trotsky builds is like I mean,
Speaker 1: it's literally a revolutionary army, but it actually is like
Speaker 1: a revolutionarily advanced fighting force. They are pioneering a lot
Speaker 1: of what will become like modern warfare tactics, and Trotsky
Speaker 1: the part of why they win the Civil war is
Speaker 1: Trotsky builds a really good army, right, the Red Army
Speaker 1: the company start purging, was quite competent. Yes, it will
Speaker 1: not stay that way because when you kill everyone who
Speaker 1: knows to do things, they don't.
Speaker 3: Work as well. In the like, the incredible amount of
Speaker 3: elimination that happened in all branches of the Red military,
Speaker 3: specifically the army and the Air force is kind of
Speaker 3: astounding when you look at statistics, like there wasn't many
Speaker 3: like officers at general level even left standing by the
Speaker 3: time the Winter War begins.
Speaker 1: And one of the things this tells you is that
Speaker 1: despite what a lot of the propaganda in the USSR
Speaker 1: says about the fascists in Germany, this is not that's
Speaker 1: not seen as the primary threat by Stalin at this point.
Speaker 3: It can't have been.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't do this if you were worried that you
Speaker 1: were just a few years away from being invaded.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, no, no fucking way, even in Stalin's paranoid mind,
Speaker 3: would he shoot himself in the foot so spectacularly if
Speaker 3: that was the case, And if he if he did,
Speaker 3: then like we've we've left the realm of paranoia and
Speaker 3: into our right insanity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you'll, like Molotov as late as nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: when interviewed, would be like, we had to do this
Speaker 1: because these people were unreliable and we knew the war
Speaker 1: was coming. You can't have unreliable people in the military.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's what Malotov believed. But it is worth
Speaker 1: noting that in the mid thirties the USSR has very
Speaker 1: close relations with the Nazis. They do joint military training
Speaker 1: exercises because they are betraying riots. Yeah, they're pariah states together, right,
Speaker 1: The Nazis and the Soviet Union not popular internationally, so
Speaker 1: they like they're like their armies are practicing together. You know.
Speaker 1: In one fell Swoop, the Red Army is shorn of
Speaker 1: its very best officers and left in a chaotic, lobotomized
Speaker 1: state under which it would enter World War Two. This
Speaker 1: does work out very well for Finland. I just say
Speaker 1: that best thing you could have done for the Finns.
Speaker 1: There were purges as well of people of Polish descent,
Speaker 1: like actual like Soviet citizens of Polish ancestry. Part of
Speaker 1: how this happens is in nineteen thirty eight, internal passports
Speaker 1: are introduced to the USSR, and people are required to
Speaker 1: list their ancestry for the first time right polls, and
Speaker 1: other members of diaspora communities in the Soviet Union are
Speaker 1: then forbidden from changing their nationality, and this is part
Speaker 1: of the pretext to an ethnic cleansing. Writing about this
Speaker 1: in the book blood Lands, historian Timothy Snyder claims the
Speaker 1: only national minority that was highly overrepresented in the end
Speaker 1: of in the NKVD at the end of the Great
Speaker 1: Terror were the Georgians Stalin's own. This Third Revolution was
Speaker 1: really a counter revolution, implicitly acknowledging that Marxism and Leninism
Speaker 1: had failed. In its fifteen or so years of existence,
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union had achieved much for those of its
Speaker 1: citizens who were still alive as the Great Terror reached
Speaker 1: its height. For example, state pensions were introduced, yet some
Speaker 1: essential assumptions of revolutionary doctrine had been abandoned. Existence, as
Speaker 1: the Marxists had said, was no longer preceded essence. People
Speaker 1: were guilty not because of their place in the socioeconomic order,
Speaker 1: but because of their ostensible personal identities or cultural connections.
Speaker 1: Politics was no longer comprehensive in terms of class struggle.
Speaker 1: If the diaspora ethnicities of the Soviet Union were disloyal.
Speaker 1: As the case against them went, it was not because
Speaker 1: they were bound to a previous economic order, but because
Speaker 1: they were supposedly linked to a foreign state by their ethnicity.
Speaker 3: And it's so interesting that Stalin does this, like surrounds
Speaker 3: himself the Cheka becomes overwhelmingly Georgian because he himself, like Barria,
Speaker 3: attempted to divorce himself from his Georgian identity and become
Speaker 3: as Russian as I mean, that's why his name is Stalin. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and he did not rule as Joseph Jugas viewy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, why would you terrible name? It's the same, yeah,
Speaker 1: rolls off the tongue.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now Barria is again not yet head of the NKVD.
Speaker 1: The job during the Great Terror. The head of the
Speaker 1: NKVD is this insanely violent dude named Yesov or as
Speaker 1: ofv is how it's spelled in some of the books.
Speaker 1: These are anglicizations, right, like, because his name is not
Speaker 1: written in that like, it's written in a totally different
Speaker 1: set of characters. So Barria is a major figure in
Speaker 1: the organization, though he rises to deputy commander of the
Speaker 1: NKVD by nineteen thirty eight, which is generally like agreed
Speaker 1: upon us the last year of the Terror. And of
Speaker 1: course he was leading the secret police in Georgia during
Speaker 1: this time. So he is a part of the machinery
Speaker 1: of the Great Terror, but he's not directing all of it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Some of the books I've read, I think Knight's book
Speaker 1: makes this case, argues that he personally informed on a
Speaker 1: number of Red Army commanders and orchestrated a significant part
Speaker 1: of the process of purging the Red Army. One Soviet
Speaker 1: official later claimed after World War Two that quote the
Speaker 1: barrier Cleek had picked up a giant crystal of oz
Speaker 1: containing eighty two thousand of the best, most experienced and
Speaker 1: qualified commanders and political workers in the army and navy
Speaker 1: and smashed it on the rocks. That's true for what
Speaker 1: happens to the army and navy. It I would say
Speaker 1: it seems to me, at least based on what I've read, again,
Speaker 1: not a historian here, that that's an overstatement of Barria's role, right,
Speaker 1: because he's not right now. And again some people will
Speaker 1: say he was kind of putting the whisper in Yazov's ear,
Speaker 1: and he was a major figure in this The officer
Speaker 1: that Barria is most often accused of informing on and
Speaker 1: getting killed is this general level officer, a major figure
Speaker 1: in the army that the Germans had also leaked information on.
Speaker 1: Like the German the Nazis basically claimed that he had
Speaker 1: been spying on the government for them because they want
Speaker 1: this guy out of the way, because he's a competent commander, right,
Speaker 1: they know it's going to happen next to him. Yes,
Speaker 1: other accounts I've read paint Barrier as just as terrified
Speaker 1: as everyone else on the Central Committee. You know, he
Speaker 1: is doing this, He is having people killed and stuff,
Speaker 1: but not because he is wanting to orchestrate a purge
Speaker 1: as much as because he's scrambling to save his own ass.
Speaker 1: And he's kind of it's kind of a miserable period
Speaker 1: for him under this version of events, because he's having
Speaker 1: to burn a lot of people he trusts. You know,
Speaker 1: he's having to throw a lot of his good subordinates
Speaker 1: to the wolves.
Speaker 3: And he's not.
Speaker 1: Sad about that because it hurts him emotionally. But he
Speaker 1: said about that because like, useful people are useful, and
Speaker 1: he's having to kill a lot of useful people, you know,
Speaker 1: and that causes problems for him down the line. I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from the book on Stalin's
Speaker 1: Team by Sila Fitzpatrick. Here, it was one of the
Speaker 1: conventions of the process that when there were arrests in
Speaker 1: your own bailiwick, you had to sign off on them.
Speaker 3: Well, what could you do?
Speaker 1: Varoshaalov had to supervise the purging of the military, though
Speaker 1: he was not happy about it. Danov, Khrushchev and Baria,
Speaker 1: the last two not yet Politburo members, were doing the
Speaker 1: same in the regions they headed, though they did it
Speaker 1: under local NKVD direction and without particular enthusiasm since it
Speaker 1: was their people they were purging.
Speaker 3: So again, that's kind of.
Speaker 1: The two pictures of Baria and you both can't be true, right.
Speaker 1: One is that he has caught masterminding aspects of the terror.
Speaker 1: He's really into it. He's a major role in purging
Speaker 1: the army because he sees it, as you know, benefiting
Speaker 1: his own consolidation of power. And the other is, well,
Speaker 1: he's wrapped up in this like everyone else, but his
Speaker 1: primary motivation is trying not to get killed, right, And
Speaker 1: that's why to be a lit true like aspects of both. Sure, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean I do believe in that one thing that
Speaker 3: you were saying before, like proving his loyalty through brutality
Speaker 3: of close and important people. And he's doing that because
Speaker 3: I think anybody in the Soviet Union is seeing how
Speaker 3: wildly spiraling this violence is getting, and it's coming for everyone,
Speaker 3: says I have to go into overdrive doing what I
Speaker 3: was already doing before. Yes, to save my own fucking ass. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: And I'm not one to give Barria any benefit of
Speaker 3: the doubt, but there's no real reason to believe he
Speaker 3: was not just as terrified and wrongfooted as everyone else
Speaker 3: was by this whole nightmare. The Great Purge hit most
Speaker 3: heavily at the second tier of the political hierarchy in
Speaker 3: the Soviet Union. In other words, the men who were
Speaker 3: a level below Stalin's team and the Politbureau, which are
Speaker 3: nearly one and the same two thirds of the nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty four Central Committee were killed in the purges. Barria
Speaker 3: himself was not protected by close daily association with Stalin
Speaker 3: to the extent that that even protected you, and he
Speaker 3: did come close to being annihilated. He was nearly arrested
Speaker 3: in the Midsummer of nineteen thirty eight, but was warned
Speaker 3: ahead of time and flies to Moscow to make his
Speaker 3: case directly to Stalin, and this apparently works. Now it's
Speaker 3: unclear to me the degree to which Berria influenced Yesov's
Speaker 3: behavior working as his deputy, but my guess is he
Speaker 3: tried to stay as clear of the man as possible.
Speaker 3: At this point, he's been through several rounds of purges
Speaker 3: and he knows that, like after the violence subsides, the
Speaker 3: people who were doing the killing there are going to
Speaker 3: be scapegoats because then the government has to kind of apologize.
Speaker 3: Stalin has to backpedal a little. That's the way this
Speaker 3: process works. And the last thing you want to be
Speaker 3: is the guy at the head of the NKVED when
Speaker 3: that happens, Hey, I would be the next guy down.
Speaker 3: He want to be the next guy down. So when
Speaker 3: they all get wiped out, like time for my promotion now.
Speaker 1: One of the funny so Yezov and a lot of
Speaker 1: the writings, specifically on a lot of the writings Soviets
Speaker 1: who were survivors of the purges, when they write about Yazov,
Speaker 1: they'll call him the bloodthirsty dwarf, and I assumed at first, like, well,
Speaker 1: is he actually like a little person. No, he's just
Speaker 1: five foot tall, right, that's why they call him that,
Speaker 1: which is that short for the period?
Speaker 3: You just a little guy. He's a little guy.
Speaker 1: He is a little guy, right, And he was generally
Speaker 1: seen as being terrible at anything but cruel to you
Speaker 1: will hear some people who will argue, actually, he was
Speaker 1: like kind of a thoughtful, quiet dude, and we were
Speaker 1: really surprised when he murdered all those people. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I didn't know the man after the terror died down,
Speaker 1: though he was forced out, he's eventually executed and in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, at the very end of nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: Barria had been put in his place as head of
Speaker 1: the NKVD.
Speaker 3: Some of Stalin's.
Speaker 1: Trust is five eight Okay, so he's taller, but tall.
Speaker 3: I mean, he's not going to start on the Soviet
Speaker 3: basketball too many times.
Speaker 2: No, I still think that that's like, you know, tiny.
Speaker 3: It's weird.
Speaker 1: Had to call him a dwarf for being fi Yes,
Speaker 1: I think, right, yeah, that's.
Speaker 3: A perfectly like that's fine.
Speaker 1: Well no, no, no, they're calling Yesov a dwarf because he's
Speaker 1: five feet tall. No one calls Barria that. But it's
Speaker 1: weird to me that they call Yesov that because like
Speaker 1: five feet like my grandma was five feet tall.
Speaker 3: I mean I'm six three, bloody dwarf. Yeah, blood there, Joe,
Speaker 3: just like I'll do it.
Speaker 2: I'll take Bud.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm coming. I'm stomping out of the Caucuses mountains
Speaker 3: for revenge.
Speaker 1: Some of Stalin's trust in Barria was surely the result
Speaker 1: of the charm campaign that Barria was still waging on
Speaker 1: the Boss Night writes quote. In nineteen thirty seven, Stalin
Speaker 1: failed to attend his mother's funeral in Georgia, Barria acting
Speaker 1: as his surrogate, making the arrangements and presiding over the ceremony.
Speaker 1: Whatever the reasons were, Stalin's absence, it was not only
Speaker 1: a terrible insult to the memory of his dead mother,
Speaker 1: but also a shocking breach of the cultural and societal
Speaker 1: trade in a country where veneration of the dead is
Speaker 1: accorded the highest importance. Barria was then not simply a
Speaker 1: sycophant who gained Stalin's favor by insidious means. He actively
Speaker 1: encouraged Stalin's neurosis and his sense of self alienation stirred
Speaker 1: him up as no one else could do. Stalin depended
Speaker 1: emotionally on Barria, who was at his side constantly. From
Speaker 1: the early nineteen forties onward. Barria acted as the unofficial
Speaker 1: toastmaster at Stalin's Endless dinners, which all members of his
Speaker 1: inner circle were required to attend, forcing the guests to
Speaker 1: consume large quantities of alcohol and making crude scatological jokes.
Speaker 1: What a cool group of dudes to hang out with.
Speaker 1: Barria was just a bit guy. He was a bit guy.
Speaker 1: He loved a good bit. Stalin's a bit guy too.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One of his favorite things was to shove a tomato
Speaker 1: in someone's pocket, and you had to pretend you didn't
Speaker 1: see him put the tomato there, and then he'd smash
Speaker 1: it or you'd sit down and squash it. Oh, he
Speaker 1: just had to do it. Comic, He's a prop comic. Look,
Speaker 1: this is why we should execute Carrot Top. I've been
Speaker 1: saying this for years. I mean, these days, that's gonna
Speaker 1: be one hell of a fight. Yeah, no, he is.
Speaker 3: He would be tough to bring down. That man is
Speaker 3: more trend than man at this point, so I.
Speaker 2: I fact checked that ys have height, and I just
Speaker 2: want you to know that he is described as four
Speaker 2: foot eleven and one half inch.
Speaker 3: Oh my half inch. I just want you to know
Speaker 3: he there's okay.
Speaker 2: From my experience, there's at least a couple of inches
Speaker 2: added there. But they do add that he was also
Speaker 2: called the poison Dwarf, which is.
Speaker 3: Which is really cool.
Speaker 1: That is pretty dope. That is pretty dope. Say hair
Speaker 1: metal band fronted by Gimley.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'd be so cool. I'm on board, shout out Gimley.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he never poisoned anybody that we're aware of.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean, John Rice Davies definitely is poisoned at
Speaker 1: least one person. That's why slide he's got that last season.
Speaker 1: I don't think he was even on the show at
Speaker 1: that point.
Speaker 2: Actually, Gimley gave us one of my favorite movie lines
Speaker 2: of all time, toss me. You're going to have to
Speaker 2: toss me.
Speaker 3: That's what he's into. He just likes being thrown. I
Speaker 3: know how often do you get to use that? Just
Speaker 3: just throw me, just please.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is just like a great way to
Speaker 2: end this episode is just to like really be happy
Speaker 2: about Gimbley right, Robert.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Look, there's a lot that's I won't go to
Speaker 1: bat for about John Ryce Davies, but he's a hell
Speaker 1: of an actor. You know, you got to give him that.
Speaker 1: He's super conservative. I don't think he's I don't think
Speaker 1: he's a particular I haven't heard any particular monsters.
Speaker 3: I don't care. It's fine.
Speaker 1: He was. He was good as Gimley. He's good in Sliders.
Speaker 1: There's some problematic aspects of him in the Indiana Jones movies,
Speaker 1: but by god, he's charismatic anyway, Joe, where can people
Speaker 1: find you? I am the host of the Lions, Little
Speaker 1: by Donkeys podcasts. We talk about military disasters, interesting things
Speaker 1: from military history, and much like your show, incredibly depressing things.
Speaker 3: That you know you can fall asleep to. I'm also
Speaker 3: an author. You can find my books anywhere you find
Speaker 3: your books, and I currently have a science fiction series
Speaker 3: out called The Undying Legion, and check that out if
Speaker 3: you'l like science fiction.
Speaker 1: Yes, check that out. And you know what you should
Speaker 1: check out the check a by forming your own secret police,
Speaker 1: you know, be the secret police you want to see,
Speaker 1: purge your inner circle in your life, you know, just
Speaker 1: just to start digging holes, folks. You know, I say
Speaker 1: it a lot, but start digging holes. You know, making lists.
Speaker 3: Never ready to purge people.
Speaker 1: You never know when you're gotta need to do a
Speaker 1: purge to make some weirdo happy, make it get to
Speaker 1: be able to watch a Cowboy movie with him.
Speaker 3: Look, always be.
Speaker 1: Thinking about which one of your friends and loved ones
Speaker 1: you're willing to kill so you can stay up light
Speaker 1: late watching Cowboy movies. Anyway, We'll be back next week
Speaker 1: with parts three and.
Speaker 3: Four, unless we get purged.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
Speaker 2: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.