Part Three: Beria: Stalin's Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer

Robert and Joe get into the meat of the Beria story: the invasion of Poland and start of World War 2.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media here, everyone, Robert Evans here, and before we
get to the episode, obviously a lot of people in
Gaza need a lot of different help. But we've been
connected to the Algazawi family by a friend of ours
who's doing aid work there right now. They are trying
to get fourteen members of their family out of Gaza

(00:22):
before you know, things get any worse for them, and
they're raising money to do so on go fund me.
If you google help al Gazawe family escape Gaza go
fund Me, you can find it. Algazawie is spelled a
l g h a zz a w I.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
We're trying to help them, you know, get to a
safer place, so please consider donating if you can. Behind
the Bastards podcast Bad People tell you all about Them.
Welcome back to our epic four parter on the Vrinti Barrier.
Every Buddy's second favorite Georgian who went on to commit

(01:04):
crimes against humanity?

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, even the people of Georgia's second favorite.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah, yeah, definitely the people of Georgia's second favorite.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
He is he is not quite winning against against our
buddy Stalin, But who is winning today is our guest
in this fine podcast Joe Kasabian, Joe, welcome to the
pro Hey, thanks for I'm happy to be the second
Joe mentioned so far in this episode. Yeah, it's good
to be back. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
I mean, if you're gonna want to become like the
unquestioned head of the USSR, you're going to need a
pithier last name than Kassebian. It's just not going to sell.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
I mean, just like Joseph Stalin had to change his
last name, I'm gonna have to change mine.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Have you considered a different alloy, Joe, tungsten?

Speaker 2 (01:52):
That could work. I'm more of like a man of
aluminum type guy. Depending on the year, that could be
very valuable, but not all that really Yeah yeah, yeah,
speaking of useful but not all that reliable.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Let's get back to the story of Lavni Barrier. When
we left off our buddy, he had kind of finally
worked his way into Stalin's good books. He had succeeded Yazov,
the man that everybody called a homicidal dwarf, despite the
fact that he was five feet tall, which is a
like a normal human height.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I think somebody says, like Napoleon was sure he was
just normal size. It's more fun to think of evil
people as short, because then there no kind of adorable
and innocent Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
As opposed to someone with millions of people's blood on
their hands. I don't know why we think it makes
it better, but I guess people did. But anyway, Yezov
is out. He's going to be killed pretty soon after
this because he's a guy who lost his job as
secret policeman in the Soviet Union. And that's what happens
when you're a secret policeman.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yes, severance packages are normally you know, I don't know
how much oker have bullet costs, but it's worth about
that much money. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
The severance packages are measured in millimeters plait Lubkov hid. Yeah,
and that's more or less what happens to Yezov. So
so by kind of the late nineteen thirties thirty seven
or so Barria is thirty eight, like late nineteen thirty eight.
Barria is the head of the NKVD. He's gotten close

(03:24):
to Stalin by becoming his mom's nurse and then attending
his mom's funeral in lieu of Joseph Stalin, which is
great Stalin. At least two biographers they've read say Stalin
always felt bad about this. I don't know that I
believe Stalin felt bad about things.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Maybe I don't think Stalin ever felt bad about anything. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Perhaps maybe it's like a Darth Vader thing where he's
like doing the big like cheesy, no is he is?

Speaker 2 (03:48):
He did?

Speaker 1 (03:49):
Did Stalin have a powered body armor that acted as
a life support system?

Speaker 2 (03:55):
I assume so it worked all the way until he
collapsed into a pile of his zone piss in his office. Yes. Yeah, so.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
November of nineteen thirty eight, KVD head at Yezov had
been forced to resign citing his health and the strait
of being overworked. Laverni Barria replaces him, and he does
the normal thing you do when you take over for
the secret Police, which is purge all of the guys
who had been loyal to the dude before you. Right now,
one of the things that happens whenever this goes on

(04:24):
is that you wind up purging all of the people
who had done the last round of purges, which which
Barria does. And that's really kind of the safe move, right.
You want the people who are really good at carrying
out a purge out of there, because you know that's
not going to benefit you at all if they're sitting
around with their finger on any triggers.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, it's like any company, however, that has like a
complete one percent turnover rate in three years. You got
to start getting a little bit worried about where you like.
The only way to secure, to make sure that you
don't end up in a ditch, is to put everybody
else in a dish. Yeah, it's an Amazon did about
kind of situation. Yeah, maybe he does assume this is
how every Amazon warehouse works, but with robots.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
And like an Amazon warehouse. His first job is to
hound his predecessor's wife into suicide, which he does of
course Jesus. She wants taking poison that is supplied by
his old boss, Sergo, who has also been killed by
this points widow. So Sergo's wife is like, I know
the plan, Like, look, your husband got fired, you should

(05:23):
probably just take this poison.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
I promise it's what. It's better to eat this than
what Lavrenti has planned for you otherwise. It is nineteen
thirty eight in the Soviet Union. Things aren't going to
get better anytime soon.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
You really don't want to be around for the next
like seven years.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
It's all bad. Yeah, maybe we should take her daily
vitamin suicide pill.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah, yeah, just go ahead and take this. You'll you'll
miss out on some bad times. So the rate of
arrests and executions does decline after late nineteen thirty eight,
but not by as much as you'd think, Like people
will generally agree this is the end of the error,
but they're still executing quite a few people, and now
it's Barria kind of doing the executions. Three arrested Politbureau

(06:08):
members are killed in early nineteen thirty nine, and Barria
handles those executions. But these proved to be that a
deer of this particular level of fear, at least for
high ranking Soviet officials. The next thing Barry is going
to do is follow in his former bosses footsteps, purging
Red Army officers. And since all of the really good
ones are gone, he's not even purging the top guys

(06:29):
at this point, right he's.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Taking out random lieutenants.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
There's one Marshal here. Right after he moves to Moscow
to like take over the NKVD, he's going to wind
up like torturing Marshall. Blucher b l i U k
h e Er is how it's usually anglicized. And Barria
he's not great at He's not as good at torturing
as he's going to be, so he kind of accidentally
beats this guy until he loses an eye and dies

(06:56):
a few weeks later from his injuries.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
On the job injuries. You know, it's a bummer.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
You know you're not supposed to torture them quite that much.
But what do you do when you've accidentally killed this
guy too fast? You torture his wife? Right? Uh?

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Sure, that's what it says in my employee handbook.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, yeah, that's the norm for podcasters. And this Marshall's
wife is later going to claim she felt that Barrya
tortured her just for sadistic curiosity, kind of because he
had killed her husband too early. I don't know how
well to judge that.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
He's got to get better at it. You know, he
needs on.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
The job twenty ten thousand hours of torturing to get
really good at it. That's what that Malcolm Gladwell book
is about.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
If I'm remembering it priorly, I think it might actually
have been.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, that book is torture, so I get it now.
As the killing receded, a sense of cautious optimism emerged
among the men of Stalin's inner circle, and Barria is
now officially among them. At the eighteenth Party Congress in
March of nineteen thirty nine, the gang was met with
thunderous applause, and Stalin announced that the recent purges had
made the USSR more resilient than ever in the face

(08:01):
of ongoing fascist pressure. And again, this is the justification
guys like Molotov are going to be parrotting until literally
nineteen eighty that this great terror that kills all of
the officers who know how to do anything in the
army was necessary because you didn't want unreliable men around
when this inevitable conflict with fascism starts out.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Everybody knows the first step of every emergency is to
take the nearest firearm and just shoot the tip of
your own dick off. Yeah. Yeah, there's someone that dick
getting in the way.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah. Now they can't shoot you in the dick. You've
already suffered the worst that you can suffer, exactly. That
is kind of the logic they're working on here. It's
one of those you know, it's it's fair to say
that Stalin at least always expresses that war with the
Nazis is inevitable, and obviously Hitler believes that war with
the Soviet Union is inevitable because he starts one. That said,

(08:51):
not everybody is convinced that this is in fact the case,
and kind of some of the evidence for this is
that the Soviet Union in Nazi Germany are kind of
engaging in wargames and joint training exercises through the mid thirties,
and a much more direct threat to actual Soviet territorial
integrity in the late thirties is the Empire of Japan,

(09:12):
and they're actually going to wind up fighting the Empire
of Japan well before they wind up in a direct
conflict with the Nazis. Yeah, in Mongolia, right, yeah, yeah,
over Mongolia, that's right, because you know, the Japanese Army
has occupied Manchuria since thirty one, and they're kind of
continually expanding through the thirties, which eventually locks them into
a series of border conflicts with the Soviets. This kind

(09:33):
of culminates in the Battle of Lake Kasan in nineteen
thirty eight. That's kind of the really big engagement in
this series of clashes, and then there's a series of
kind of lower stakes battles until the calamitous battles of
Kulkin Gol in Mongolia.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yeah, that one was real bad. It's really bad. Yes.
The Soviets built an entire rail line just to get
all of their supplies there, while japan made all their
dudes mark hundreds of miles on foot.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
And by the way, not easy to make the Russian
army look efficient, but the Japanese manage it. During this fight,
it's a sizable battle for the time, by like World
War II standards. This is like a skirmish, right, There's
like tens of thousands of men and hundreds of tanks
on each side, which does not make it hugely noteworthy
within the conflict that's going to happen. But this is

(10:24):
one of the first massive tank battles in history, right,
and it's where Georgi Zukov is going to earn his reputation.
And Zukov is going to be a big player in
the war that's coming up, right.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
I think I've heard of him.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, Yeah, he's kind of noteworthy. The Japanese sixth Army
is defeated, and it's kind of clear to everybody that like,
the Empire of Japan is probably going to keep doing
Empire of Japan stuff, right. So again, within sort of
the gang that's running the USSR at this point, there's
a lot of concern about Hitler planning and invasion, but
you could be forgiven for being like, well, maybe Japan's

(10:58):
kind of the more immediate thing reret at this stage,
because I mean the first war.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
That they thought there was the Russo Japanese War as well,
that's right disastrous. Yeah, And this is kind of like
you do have to look at also, like if you're
these guys who have overthrown and replaced the czar, it's
pretty good for them to be like, well, when we
fought Japan, it went to hell of a lot better. Yeah,
we didn't lose the whole navy. Even at the end

(11:24):
of World War two, the Soviet Union would be uh,
retaking things that the Empire of Japan took during the
Russo Japanese War. So it was all like petty grievances
forty years later. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Now, and again within kind of the gang of people
around Stalin, there's still overall much more of a focus
on Hitler, which is going to prove to be pretty
wise in the long run, although how they actually prepare
for war with Hitler is not wise, because they don't
really prepare for war with Hitler, you know, see Robert
I disagree.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
They prepared plenty by murdering everyone who knew what they
were doing.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Yeah, get rid of all these guys, a final war
except for Zukhov thankfully over in Mongolia. Now there's a
couple of different plans that they kind of have for
how to play this. Stalin's first idea is to try
and develop a situation wherein Britain and France invade Germany
and he just sort of chills, which, if that had worked,
would have been a much better plan for the Soviet Union. Right,

(12:21):
hard not to see why you would prefer that. Now,
Since nineteen thirty five, the general policy of the Soviet
Union had been the popular Front against fascism, and a
lot of officials thought this meant that kind of inevitably
we're going to wind up in some sort of alliance
with Britain and France, right because they are clearly like
obviously just based on World War One. Not hard to

(12:42):
see why you would expect that that's how things are
going to break down, right, But it's not going to
wind up being that simple, as she liftitz Patrick rights.
When Britain put its negotiator on a slow boat to
Leningrad in August nineteen thirty nine, Stalin and Molotov had
had enough. Molotov was offended that the British had sent
a Foreign Office official of the second class, straying to
negotiate and straying like other Western diplomats who encountered him

(13:04):
in his first months as a foreign minister. Was struck
by Molotov's lack of diplomatic technique as well as social finesse.
He had no sense of negotiation, the British ambassador later recalled,
and would just stubbornly and woodenly repeat his own point
of view and ask innumerable questions of his interlocutors. And
you know, Molotov, because of the pact with the Nazis

(13:24):
that's going to come out of this, I think, has
this kind of reputation for being a good negotiator. He's
certainly not at this point. And again it's also not
hard to see why his immediate kind of reaction to
these Western powers isn't going to be positive, because these
guys had been enemies of the USSR since the Civil War,
right since before it's like settled as a state. So

(13:47):
it's not really surprising that one of the things that's
happening in this period contrad to what's going to happen later,
is there is some serious talk of allying with the Nazis.
That is probably never that's certainly never Stallian's plan, but
it's something Molotov thinks actually might happen for a while.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
I mean that you also have to remember, like during
and after the Russian Civil War, the British, the French,
the Americans, and the Japanese all were actively invading Russia.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yes, exactly, this is not like and also historically it's
not weird, right Otto von Bismarck had worked very hard
to develop an alliance with the Russians. Are because Bismarck,
being reasonably intelligent, is like, well, if we have an
alliance with the Russians, we just can't be invaded, Like
you can't take Germany if Russia is backing it up,

(14:35):
Like it's just not really.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
Realistic, it's pretty so do you fight that war? Right
And obviously, like the fucking Kaiser fucks all of that up,
which is part of why World War One goes the
way it does. Again, Stalin has never liked or trusted Hitler.
He sees some sort of conflict a war as pretty inevitable.
But there's definitely a period where even Stalin is like,
we might have we might be able to like temporarily

(14:57):
have some sort of an accord with the Germans that
will give us time to rebuild the Red Army, which
I know, I kind of fucked up, right, And this
is what leads to the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, which is,
you know, one of the like three treaties everybody learns
about in high school. Now, the terms in broad are
that neither state is going to attack the other or

(15:19):
help with someone else's attack on the other. That's the
public stuff in this pact, And this is a pretty
major reversal from the Popular Front against fascism obviously, right,
you can't call this the popular Front against fascism. Now,
that's the popular Front with fascism. Yeah. Yeah, secret agreements
of like, you know, let's have this cake shape like Poland, Yeah,

(15:41):
how would you like divvy it up a bit? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, And we'll get to that there. But the fact
that there is this dissonance between the old Popular Front
against Fascism and this new pact. This is like severe
enough that it causes some real issues within sort of
the Soviet power structure, and it's these are serious enough
that Stalin has to kind of take them seriously and
he actually sits down with a lot of his underlings

(16:06):
to try to explain the necessity of the move. Barrya's
son would later claim that this never works on Barria
and that he's privately unenthusiastic about the pact. I don't
know how seriously to take that. You know, the keyword
is certainly private. And was he really enthusiastic about anything
other than murder, Yeah, marrying teenagers, you know, police, Yeah,

(16:34):
beating people until they go blind.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Obviously Barria knows that his new position in Moscow is
still pretty shaky, and all the comfort that it brings
him relies on continuing to suck up to Stalin. Khrushchev
in this period describes Barria as constantly manipulative and always
working to ingratiate himself with Stalin and provide dirt on
his colleagues. Stalin, who does have kind of a sixth

(16:58):
sense for when people are kind of getting too far
up his ass. Would regularly whenever kind of Barry would
get too close, would do something to try to remind
him of his place. And we get a good example
of this in September of nineteen thirty nine, when at
a dinner, Barria kept pushing the German embassy counselor Gustav
Hilger to drink to excess. Hilger later claimed Stalin soon

(17:19):
noticed that Barry and I were in dispute about something
and asked to cross the table. What's the argument about?
When I told him, he replied, well, if you don't
want to drink, no one can force you, not even
the chief of the NKVD himself, I joked, whereupon he answered,
here at this table, even the chief of the NKVD
has no more say than anyone else, which is bull.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
She assumes is going to make him go visit his
mom again. Yeah, go see my mom again. Oh she's
dead at this point. Fuck off, Go hang out at
her grave. I'm sick of here. Get out of here, Barrier.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
I mean, this is Barry is kind of doing to
this Nazi what Stalin had him do to kind of
the other guys in the Soviet power structure, which is
he's kind of the dude at their dinner who's often
pushing people to drink more, which Stalin.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Likes to see.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
But Stalin doesn't get anything out of making this Nazi
get hammered, right, He's still trying to keep good relations
with him at this period, so he's kind of just
like Bury, what the fuck?

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Man? Like, he wants to get the best, get really
drunk so he can draw dicks on his face. You know,
really watch cowboy movies. You're gonna pass out and then
you're gonna wake up, and now I'm gonna laugh really hard.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah, tomato in your pocket and a cock on your cheek.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
So however he got about the tomato in the pocket,
it's my favorite. It's strange.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
It's hard not to like that part of Stalin, Right,
That's just such a fun little prank. It's something like
a twelve year old boy would do.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Okay, I kind of did something similar when I was
I wasn't necessarily kid. I was like sixteen maybe fifteen,
going to house parties getting drunk, and one of my
favorite things to do was like when one of my
friends had like a dog or a cat or whatever
is like find where they had the cat or dog food,
and then like slide my hand into people's pockets and
deposit fifthfuls of dog or cat food into their pockets

(19:00):
without the moticing. I have no idea why I thought
it was so funny.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
I think a lot of us have our like little
little psychopathic thing we did to our friends when they
were I used to light my friend's pants on fire,
you know, just a little bit, not all that much, right,
as a bit, you know, as a fun bit.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, it's not bad if you're like, ah, I got
you as you go, jeans are going up and fres
and if you can't have them executed for not laughing
at the bit, right, I think that's key. That is
the ultimate punchline. Yeah, it's throwing someone in a mass
gray you will laugh or else. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
So, however Barry feels about this pact with the fascists,
he presides over a purge of the People's Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs to wipe out any diplomats who have a
strong anti German history. As soon as Stalin is like,
we're we're gonna be friends with the Nazis for a
little while Barry is like, well, it's time to kill
every diplomat who doesn't like the Nazis. Right, that's going

(20:00):
to be a problem when you just had like the
Coalition against Fascism, like, right, I would like everybody in
the diplomatic off was like wait, wait, I thought anti
fascism was our thing.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
God, sorry, where are we on this? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (20:12):
And this is I mean, the main purpose of this
is not just to get rid of anti Germans. It's
largely an opportunity to take out any diplomats who are
not totally committed to Stalin, right, because a lot of
there's a lot of diplomats in the foreign policy chunk
of the USSR who are just like diplomats, right, And
that's the thing that they actually wanted to do, is
like be it functional diplomats. And what's happening in this

(20:36):
period is the NKVD is gaining what's going to be
semi permanent oversight over like the actual foreign services. Right,
Barria is going to have men in there for most
of the rest of the time that he's alive. And
so that's kind of what they're doing in this period.
And one of these guys, one of these anti German
diplomats is the dude named Litvinov who had supported forming

(20:59):
an Antian block with the West. Litvanov is one of
the guys who's like, well, Stalin, you keep saying we're
gonna fight these Nazis, we should probably have a thing
set up with the British and the French. That just
seems like good business. You know, you'll probably need this
on paper and not just vibes. Yeah, not just a
vibe thing. And Barry is going to respond to that
by having the NKVD surround Litvanov's house, and Litvanov you

(21:22):
get the feeling he's kind of like a cool customer
because when he sees he's entirely surrounded by the secret police,
he calls Barria on the phone and he's like, what
the fuck are you doing? And Barria responds, you just don't.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Know you're worth man. I gotta protect you. You're in danger, right, Yeah,
I do seem to be in danger, that is christ
I will agree with you.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
This seems unsafe now. Another arrestee in this moment is
a diplomat named Nazarov who gets busted on charges of
spying for Italy, not because he had actually spied for Italy,
but based on the undeniable fact that he had been
born in Genoa, and he'd been born in Genoa because
his parents were longtime committed Communist revolutionaries who had to
flee after the revolution right in nineteen oh five, which

(22:07):
is like really unfair to this guy. You know, your
parents are like so committed to the cause that they
have to go into exile. And then people are like, well,
you're clearly an Italian spy.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
You're trying to.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
He's trying to steal our sauces for their goddamn bostas.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
You were born in Genoa and only eat pasta. Fuck,
he cannot be trusted. This passage from Amy Knight's book
gives good context on how brutal some of these arrests
tended to be and just the sheer level of like
bullying that dominated them. Right.

Speaker 1 (22:40):
Quote, Ganadan, who's one of these guys who gets arrested,
recalls how he was taken to Barry's office after he
had refused to confess to the espionage charges that Kobilov
had accused him of. When he continued to deny the charges, Kobolov,
who weighed more than three hundred pounds and his assistants
began beating him on the skull as Barra sat complacently watching.
Then Baria impatiently ordered Ganadan to lie on the floor,

(23:01):
where he was kicked repeatedly by several prison employees. Ganadan
had one final session with Barria, who at first adopted
a thoughtful, cultured manner, asking Gannadan calmly if he had
finally decided to confess again. When Gannadan steadfastly asserted his innocence,
he was brutally beaten Barry. His last words to Ganadan were,
with such a philosophy and such provocations, you only make

(23:21):
your situation worse.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
Christ, Oh, what good would have been done to Like,
even if they are in a sent most of the time,
I'm going to assume they're probably innocent. It's like, okay,
you got me, I'm guilty. I did all this shit.
Well you're just gonna die anyway. You might as well
make him work for it. You know, you're still gonna
kill me, but you're gonna kill me tired.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, I mean that is often the decision people are
making is like, well, if I admit it, it'll hopefully
be over faster.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Right, of course, of course some of the reason why
torture doesn't work as an interrogation tactic, like I'll tell
you whatever you want as long as you stop pulling
out my fucking fingernails.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, and that's why I am kind of amazed by
the few people it doesn't work on who are like,
torturing me all you want. The one thing I have
is not giving in on this, you know. And you
do run into a couple of those guys. Not many
of them, obviously, because most people, for understandable reasons, don't
hold up under that forever. But there are a couple anyway. Yeah, Yeah,

(24:17):
at least tougher. Barria was given a Datcha on the
outskirts of Moscow that had once belonged to the former
chairman of the USSR who'd been arrested in thirty eight
and executed that year. It was furnished by the same
architect Stalin used, who was later sent to a goolag
and killed in thirty nine. Like most powerful men in
the USSR, barrias Datcha had a movie theater. Svetlana Stalin's

(24:40):
daughter claims that on Sundays at the Datcha, Barria would
relax by shooting at targets and then watching American and
German films in the evening. Afterwards, he would disappear. To quote,
no one knew where. We'll probably never know precisely how
barr has spent his off hours. But the largest allegation
you'll hear involves that he was committing rampant rape, often
of children.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Now, I was about to say, at any point there's
a long period of time where nobody can pinpoint Barria's location.
I'm assuming someone is suffering.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Someone is having the worst day of their life, and
if you want to have the best day of your life,
purchase these products. We're back and we're talking about Barria's
extracurricular activities. Now, the fact that Barria is like a

(25:32):
rampant sex criminal is often taken as a given by
people discussing his life. It is worth hammering home that
a lot of what's alleged about him comes from fellow
members of the Inner Circle, who again wanted to pin
all of the blame for Stalin's excesses on Barria. This
is in like fifty three after Stalin dies. After his arrest,
Barrya's bodyguard is going to produce a list of thirty

(25:54):
nine women who Barria was said to have had sex with,
and this is presumably a mix of just actual consensual
affairs and non consensual stuff. Another bodyguard made this allegation
summarized by night quote. Another bodyguard, Nadaria, confessed at his
trial in nineteen fifty five that he and Sarsakov picked
up young women off the streets and transported them to

(26:15):
Barry's house, where he would rape them. According to another source,
young women in Moscow came to be terrified just by
a glimpse of barious pictures in the press. Stalin, who
was a professed aesthetic in sexual matters, must have heard
what Barria was up to, but apparently chose to ignore it.
And again it's really hard, like I don't doubt this,

(26:36):
but it's also like you do have to keep the
province in mind, which is other guys who are being
tortured to confess.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
I one hundred percent believe that there's truth to both
sides of this, or Barrio was absolutely a monster in
his personal time as well, especially because like look where
they kept finding skeletons for example, as well as everybody
making him seem like, you know, one hundred thousand times
worse than he actually was, which is not a defense.

(27:03):
I mean, like especially because like Stalin went like totally
new when you'll like, I like, I think we already
talked about it. Is like he told his daughter to
never go near Barry alone. Yeah, Like, yeah, he did
that for a reason.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
Yeah, And I don't think like the fact that Svetlana
seemed to have always been aware that there was something
unsafe about this guy is some of the best evidence
we get, right, because I don't see why she would necessarily,
like why she would not have felt that way, right
if there wasn't an actual danger.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
It does make me wonder when it started, because he's
had a fair amount of power for quite a long time,
and I highly doubt he waited until you know, he's
the head of the NKVD to flip a switch and
like all right now, I'm gonna do this for fun
on my free time. Like there there had to be
something we just don't know about, you know.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, I can see it being a situation where, just
like when he's earlier in his career in Georgia, there's
just not enough good info left from that period of
time that we have many of these stories because of
how many people get purged, right, and so it's when
he gets to Moscow and there's more survivors from that
time that we get these stories. That seems plausible to me.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
One of the stories you'll hear from his bodyguards is
that they were ordered to hand each of his victims
a flower bouquet as the victim left Barra's house, and
the implication was that this made it consensual and if
they refuse the bouquet, they would be arrested and probably
don't have to guess what would happen. Then, one of
Barria's bodyguards, Sarkasov, reported that a woman who had been

(28:38):
brought to Barria rejects the flower bouquet and flees his office,
and Sarkisov hands her the flowers anyway, and Barry is like, no,
it's not a bouquet. Now, it's a wreath and may
it rot on her grave.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Christ. So yeah, again, I don't really have trouble believing this.
I don't either. It seems to be as kind of
his thing. Yeah, it's it's it's probably you know. Uh, yeah,
I don't have trouble believing it. And when you when
you hear the same story from so many different sources. Yeah,
it's it is convincing, and there's no reason, Like, yeah,

(29:14):
it makes sense that they would lie and sheld make
Barry look worse to cover their own asses, But it
makes no sense from the lie and come up with
incredibly elaborate flower based murderer reason. Right, that feels really specific. Right,
that's not something someone just pulls out of their ass,
Like it would be very easy for them to lie
and like, yeah, he was a rapist and a murderer,
not suddenly he has a flower game and he has

(29:36):
this flower based system. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Now, there are some folks who will say that this
is all buppkis. You know. One former NKVD employee has
stated he thinks it's unlikely Barria would have had time
to do this because he had so much self control
when he was so busy. And Barry's wife says the
same thing, which, like, you know, and maybe she's honestly
saying this, Like her claim is that like he was
always working already have found the time to do this,

(30:01):
and it's like, well, but he was very powerful and
it would have been easy for him to light you
about this and you know, and hardly be the first
serial killers, right, spouse no idea that they were doing
what they're doing. I mean, he was killing so many
other people, right, how would she even notice that she
that he killed thirty eight or so other people as

(30:21):
like a side gig. Yeah, And that's kind of where
I land is, like, yeah, you can. You can find
people from the United States and the seventies who were
married to someone who was committing like serial murders and
didn't know it. I don't have trouble believing that the
head of the NKVD could get away with a version
of that, you know.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Like the Green River Killer's wife had no idea that
he was the Green River killer. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, I don't need to actually think that she's trying
to cover up something to think that, like she's not
right when she states that, you.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Know, and I don't feel like Barry is the most
open soul when it comes out deeping meaningful conversations with
their skins.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
I would not be surprised to hear that he was
not great at communication with sort of his relayation ship.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, probably a fair assessment, you know.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, So anyway, this is a thing that is debated
and it's kind of worth talking about the degree to
which some of this is uncertain. Knight concludes the argument
around it this way. Even if the stories circulating in
Moscow were exaggerated, they almost certainly had some foundation. They
were corroborated by Edward Ellis Smith, a young American diplomat
who was serving in the US embassy in Moscow after
the war. Smith noted that Barry's escapades were common knowledge

(31:27):
among embassy personnel at the time because his house was
on the same street as a residence for Americans, and
those who lived there saw girls brought to Barry's house
late at night in a limousine.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
So there you go.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
But, like Knight says, I think it's almost certain that
he was committing what we would consider to be a
pretty huge number of sex crimes. That seems easy to argue,
you know.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, I mean, like a well regarded journalist at Grover
Furr would probably disagree.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
So on November thirtieth, nineteen thirty nine, the USSR invaded Finland.
This would prove to be not the best idea that
ever happened out of the Stalinist era, largely because Finns
are notably bullish on remaining fins. This kind of goes badly.
The USSR gets expelled from the League of Nations, although
that's not really a huge loss for them, but they

(32:19):
do suffer titanic casualties, which further contributes to the kind
of collapse of the Red Army which appeared so total
in nineteen forty that Hitler grew convinced he only needed
to kick in the door to couse the whole house
to collapse. And obviously Hitler is not accurate here, but
the Red Army is not looking good after the invasion
of Finland.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
For his part, small plug here my show, we did
a series on the Winter War. Yehile ago, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yeah, a good one to listen to to figure out
how Finland can hold off the Red Army and inflict
what like around a million casualties.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
It didn't go great for the Soviet Yeah yeah, don't
piss off guys who are into butterflies.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
It turns out that hins Back. For his part, Barrier
did crucial work on the Finnish front. Largely he established
the NKVD ensemble of song and dance to ensure the
young boys being sent to die to finish snipers had
one last night of very mid entertainment. That is such
an imagine being sent to get shot to death by lepidopterists.

(33:21):
And your last relaxing experience is the nkv D Song
and Dance Unit. This sounds like the most depressed song
and dance like what are what is the the the
goth version of theater? Kids like that? That's the kind
of energy I expect to be brought here. Yeah, everybody's dancing,
no smiles in any faces? There yea, and there there

(33:44):
music listing all ska.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Yeah. Oh hey, now that would be a nice last night.
If it's good.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Scott brings some real big fish out there before you
get murked on the finish front, nobody nice style.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
Like their horn player barely knows how to play. Nobody's skinning.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
They're just doing that fucking mighty mighty boss Stones album
about the George Floyd. Oh what a horrible time.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Hey look there's a landmine. Pick it up, Pick it up,
pick it up, pick it up.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
So Barria also spends a lot of time fucking up
his new position as the center of Foreign Affairs now
that the NKVD is basically overseeing the Foreign Affairs office
and watching over every diplomat's every move. Barria found the
temptation to fuck with things too great to endure. As
part of the German Soviet packed the Nazi sent a

(34:42):
battle cruiser to Russia as payment for raw materials. Barria
had his men try to entrap the Nazi naval officer
who brought the ship. The goal was to turn him
into a double agent. But they were really bad about this,
and Hitler found out and complained to Stalin, and Stalin's like,
what the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 2 (35:00):
We needed this boat. Why are you doing this? Nobody
told you to fuck with them this way. Barry is
such a weirdo he can't even honeypot. Someone correctly, no,
He's far too weird for that. So the Nazi Soviet
Treaty was publicly just a non aggression pact, but like
any good treaty, it included a bunch of secret protocols,

(35:21):
and these laid out how when the Nazis carried out
their invasion of Poland, the Red Army would be allowed
to move into eastern Poland and some of the Baltic states. Right,
and this doesn't happen kind of all at once. They
move into Poland first, the Baltic States kind of stay
independent on paper for a while, and the Red Army
moves into the Baltic States. But this process starts in
September nineteen thirty nine, and when it does, Barria finds

(35:44):
himself presiding over a vast number of captured Polish officers
and soldiers, something like two hundred thousand men. Oh no, oh,
that's the really good sign.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
No, no, you certainly don't want to be one of
these Polish officers now.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
So I don't think anybody loves a good protocol quite
like the Russian Secret Police at any given era of time. Yeah,
they're loving good protocols, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Yeah, you don't want I mean, none of this is
going to be a good situation. Now, About half these
two hundred thousand guys are freed pretty quickly, because holding
prisoners is expensive and kind of a pain in the ass.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
You got to feed them, and shit, you gotta.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
Feedom you gotta take. It's just the logistic problems. But
this is going to quickly turn into a very ugly situation.
As Timothy Snyder lays out in this passage from Bloodlands Lavnti,
Berria had come to a conclusion. Perhaps inspired by Stalin,
Barria made it clear in writing that he wanted the
Polish prisoners of war dead. In a proposal to the
polit Bureau and thus really to Stalin, Barria wrote on

(36:42):
fifth March nineteen forty that each of the Polish prisoners
was just waiting to be released in order to interactively
into the battle against Soviet power. He claimed that counter
revolutionary organizations and the new Soviet territories were led by
former officers, unlike the claims about the Polish military organization
a couple million of years before. This was no fantasy.
The Soviet Union had occupied an annexed half of Poland,

(37:04):
and some Poles were bound to resist. Perhaps twenty five
thousand of them took part in some kind of resistance
organization in nineteen forty. True, these organizations were quickly penetrated
by the NKVD and most of these people arrested, but
the opposition was real and demonstrable. Barrier used the reality
of Polish resistance to justify his proposal for the prisoners,
quote to apply to them the supreme punishment shooting. So

(37:27):
they take this chunk of Poland, a chunk about a
quarter of the people they initially take prisoner, engage in
some kind of resistance activity like you do when your
home is invaded and occupied. And Barria uses the resistance
that's there to justify shooting as many of these guys
as we possibly can. Right now, there's debate, is this

(37:49):
a thing that Barria proposes and Stalin rubber stamps. Is
this this thing that Stalin made clear in a conversation
like Barria, I want you doing this, and then Barrier just.

Speaker 2 (37:58):
Carries it out.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
You get the kind of debate with a lot of
the stuff that Barria does, Right, is.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
This a third time believing he's committing such a wide
scale massacre without some kind of official approval.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
Certainly some kind of official approval, But I also Stalin's
doing enough that I wouldn't be wildly surprised if it's
Barria saying, hey, I think this is a good idea
and Stalin going yeah, man, let's fucking let's go for it.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
You know, That's what that really probably was. Much like
there's no written order from Hitler to commit the Holocaust.
They's like, yeah, going.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Really, how the guy worked? You know, he's got a
lot on his plate. Regardless it is Barria, who is
in position and is going to take responsibility for the
massacre of a great number of Polish captives. To do this,
he had to revive the logic and tools of the
Great Terror. A new Troika system was established to go
through the files of every Polish pow. Most of these
men had already been interrogated and generally shown to have

(38:48):
been nothing but soldiers who had done their duty. Barria
instructed the troikas to ignore all previous conclusions and issue
new verdicts. They would not actually need to interview any
of these prisoners to do this, of course, as in
the Terror, Berria gave his men a quota. In all,
ninety seven percent of the nearly fifteen thousand Poles and
various camps were put to death, along with six thousand

(39:11):
Polish officers held in prisons and another thirteen hundred and
five who were arrested in April of nineteen forty. This
was disguised until the last moment, with prisoners who were
evacuated being told that they would be sent back to
their homes. It's likely many of them realized something was fishy,
but there was little to do but queue up for
the buses. And trains that eventually took them to a
train station. Snyder continues quote there they found themselves disembarking

(39:35):
from the train into a cordon of NKVD soldiers with
bayonets fixed. About thirty of them at a time. Entered
a bus which took them to the Goat Hills at
the edge of a forest called Caton. There, at an
NKVD resort, they were searched and their valuables taken. One officer,
Adam Soulski, had been keeping a diary up to this moment.
They asked about my wedding ring. The prisoners were taken
into a building on the complex, where they were shot.

(39:57):
Their bodies were then delivered, probably by truck, in batches
of thirty to a mass grave that had been dug
in the forest. This continued until all four hundred and
ten prisoners sent from Kozeltsk had been shot. The six
thousand some odd Poles held in prisons in Belarus and
Ukraine were executed indoors rather than in a field. Snyder
tells one hideous story of an NKVD officer shooting the shit,

(40:19):
just kind of bullshitting with an eighteen year old boy
while he waited for the executions to start. He asked
the kid, like, what was your job in the Polish Army?
The kid says telephone operator. He's like, how long did
you do it? The kid says six months? And then
he goes and shoots the kid in the back of
the head. Christ this kid, and in six three hundred
and thirteen other prisoners at least were handcuffed in a
soundproof sell and shot in the base of the skull.

(40:43):
So this is like pretty bad stuff.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
You know, it's not good being uh you know, it's
the NKVD found him guilty of high crime in the
Soviet Union, which is being Polish, being a Polish dude. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
Now, one of Barry's main triggerman is a guy named
the Silly Blokin Vasilly had been an MKVD executioner during
the terror and he had done the deed on some
of the highest ranking prisoners that were purged. Today, Blooken
holds the official Guinness World Record for most prolific official executioner.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
I checked out what's a high ward? What a high honor?
And did he escape being purged himself?

Speaker 1 (41:23):
He does, I think eventually get purged, you know, honestly,
I don't have that on here. I probably should have,
but I what I do have on here Joe I
found his official Guinness website page for his his world record.
And boy howdy does the website design of the Guinness
website seem inappropriate for hosting an article about this guy?
Check this shit out, souff. He's got to put the
most Prolific Official exit. They didn't even capitalize every the

(41:47):
first letter and every word of that.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Oh my god, what is this? What is this title?
It's like it's like most Prolific Official Executioner above, like
an image that's just like a cut of like the
tallest man in the world. Yeah, people like the biggest
bad photoshop a lady with long fingernails, a guy balancing
a bike on his chin. Meanwhile, no picture of him?

(42:10):
What's it like? This are what is happening? Yeah? He's
a stinky leg right, he's doing this? Thank you. It's
fucking incredible. This is one of those records that, like
Guinness wouldn't have up anymore for fear of someone attempting
to break it, But like this one, I think I
feel like we're safe on this one.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
Because you note that Joe immediately after This pretty grotesque
graphic comes the note this record is currently inactive and
no applications are being accepted for it. They closed this one.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
And here I thought Jeremy Renner would finally beat a
Guinness World record. We don't know what he's doing spare time.
This could have been his. Ah. God, that is sad, though, folks.
I know it.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Someone at home has a dream to be the Sillies
record and I am sorry, but the Guinness people have
made up their minds.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Some poor civil servant that works for the state of
Texas immediately got let down. There's a postal worker driving
around listening to this show who's just like, a rats,
damn it because I have to go back to growing
my fingernails now.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
It would not if you're paying for your own bullets.
This is not a cheap world record to meet because
they estimate this guy's kill total at some seven thousand people,
so you.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
Can't do that anymore these days.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
WHOA, Yeah, he's an interesting guy vacilly. He wears a
leather cap apron and long gloves to keep clean. He
uses German pistols. If you're got a mass execute people,
you're gonna want a German handgun.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
Right, so you certainly don't want a Russian times. No,
you definitely don't want a Russian one, right. You know,
in nineteen eleven probably would have been great for field executions,
but I understand maybe they were hard to find. I'm
guessing a Mauser pretty reasonable gun to use for that
at this period of time, small caliber, less splattered. He
is wearing an apron. The man is well prepared, he
has his Merit badge in preparedness. You have to assume

(44:05):
he was good at this, right, Yeah, otherwise you have
been fired after like I don't know, A doesn't.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
No, No, he keeps doing this and he's during this
massacre of these Polish officers. He's in just other soldiers.
It's not all officers. He's going to execute about two
hundred and fifty men each night personally.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Which is a lot.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
Yeah, that's a lot of dudes to shoot on your own.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
He's going to get a repetitive stress injury and his
trigger finger, he gets a fucking carpal tunnel. He used
to wear one of those little risk guard things before
he goes to bed at night, gets like whatever their
purple heart is for repetitive stress injuries. In the field
of genocide. Yeah, Christ's that's good, that's nice. It's really
sad that he probably survives World War two, right, Like,

(44:49):
that's unfortunate. I think, well, yeah, you know what, I'll
edit that in here when I look it up. But first, Joe,
you know what, I don't have to edit my love
for these products and services. I'm really glad that your
ad finally sold me the proper risk support I need

(45:13):
for pulling the trigger hundreds of times. Yes, yeah, Look,
if you're going to be like the silly bloken, you
need a wrist brace. It's just irresponsible to kill seven
thousand men without one. He makes it to fifty three. Oh,
that motherfucker, he makes it. He did the end of Stalin, Yeah,
he does, he does. He's forcibly retired after Stalin dies.

(45:35):
He gets stripped of his rank during the destolinization process
by Khrushchev. And then it does seem like he dies,
maybe just as a result of being super unhealthy and sick.
He kills himself officially execution. It may have been a
heart attack, and yeah, well, the only person who can
kill me is me, the guy who knows how to

(45:56):
do with the best.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah, I will say, living to sixty when you're this
guy is not bad. Yeah, I mean it's bad because
he's bad. But that's impressive for the guy who shoots
seven thousand.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Normally, the death squad guy isn't the one that survives
this long. No. No, that's a good span for the
death squad guy. The stars that burn the brightest, burning fast. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
So, while all of these prisoners are still alive, Barry
had allowed them to communicate with their families, like send
letters back and forth, not out of humanity, but because
again he's about to do another crime against humanity. He
wants to collect the names and addresses of their family members.
And after he executes all of these people, he takes
the friends and family that they had been communicating with

(46:42):
and he rounds them up and deports them to Kazakhstan.
This winds up being something like sixty something thousand people,
and in in KVD transport documents they're described as family
members have quote former people.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
Oh god. This is around the same time the Soviet
Support Law large numbers of Chechens and Dahkistani's to Kazakhstan.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
A lot of deportations are happening right at this time,
right This is kind of the This is kind of
like he's sort of breaking the seal on doing mass deportations.
And Baria is the mass deportation guy because he's good
at logistics, right, Like he's brutal for a lot of
people are dying during this, but he's good at moving
lots of people, you know. And again, I probably don't

(47:24):
have to labor on the fact that this is a
miserable situation for the people being deported. These evacuees, to
use the Nazi term, were not properly cared for or fed.
They were put to an unfamiliar land, They were separated
from their homes and their support networks, and thousands of
them die. Their situation is so bad that on May twentieth,
nineteen forty, a group of these Polish children write Stalin

(47:47):
a fawning letter, swearing, please Stalin, we will be loyal
Communists and then begging it's hard to live without our fathers.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
So that's bleak. I really hope Barria doesn't read that
and he's like, okay, well I'll send you to your fathers.
Then that is how Barria would read that letter.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Yeah, it's probably good that he didn't get access to this. Now,
these NKVD executioners and the guys who manage the deportations,
Barria does make sure they get a cash bonus, you know,
because he's a good boss.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
At least.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
You had mentioned the other deportations. There's a lot of them.
In March of nineteen forty, Barria had ordered the deportation
of any Poles who refused a Soviet passport, arguing that
they had rejected the Soviet system. Now there are good
reasons to not want this passport, because this passport, and
this passport system is pretty new at the time, lists
your ethnicity, and that had been used to target members

(48:40):
of national groups.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
The vast majority of people deported in this first wave
of deportations are Jewish refugees who had fled to Eastern
Poland from Western Poland, making the best choice they could
at the time, which is like, well, the Communists are
probably better for us than the Nazis, right, And then it's.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
A rough choice to have to make. It's not a lot.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
It's not like as much better as you'd hope, right,
because the Nazis are going to try to kill everybody,
and Barry is just going to force all of these
people further to the east, where a lot of them died,
but not all of them, right, And.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
The Soviet passport, by the way, never takes your ethnicity
off of it the entire length of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
No, that is always a major thing, and it's going
to be. There's also a lot of these guys who
are like Western Polish Jews are like, well, we're not
we're refugees. We had to flee here to not die.
But like, I'm not a Soviet citizen. I don't want
to be a Soviet citizen, right, I want to go
back home at some point, which is why they you know,
but that's seen as like a sign that they're not

(49:41):
reliable of disloyalty, rather than a pretty normal response to
the situation that they're in right.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
Now.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
That said, you know, at least a lot of these
people do survive, and maybe they wouldn't have, probably wouldn't
have if they'd stayed in Western Poland.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
You know. So I don't know, I don't know where
you want to like place, it's a rough time. It's
like trying to pick which kind of shit is the
best or in the right.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
Yeah, at least maybe you live through this kind of shit,
you know. Now, at the same time Barry is managing
all these mass deportations, they get much broader than this.
Right again, a lot of not too long from now,
a lot of Chechens are going to be deported like this.
This is a pretty widespread program. Barry is also presiding
over the vast expansion of the Gulag system. Now, Gulag

(50:28):
is an acronym and it stands for main Administration of
Corrective labor Colonies. But you know, whatever that is in Russian,
you know, I don't speak it. By March of nineteen forty,
as Barria expelled Jewish refugees from West Poland, the Gulag
system included about fifty three full camps, four hundred twenty
five corrective labor colonies, and fifty colonies for children. In total,

(50:50):
I think something like one point six to one point
seven million people are intermed.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Those numbers have a little flex right, everybody knows, like
a good for any good empire is to have prison
colonies for children. Yeah, that puts you on the right
side of history. And there's no debating that.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
Yeah, why wouldn't you want camps just for little kids
to be forcibly separated from their families.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Their little fingers can get into machinery, right, right, right
that you have. I mean, that is kind of where
this goes, because like any sort of large scale labor
camp program, these are largely an economic incentive, right, Like,
that's why what the gulag system is in large degree. Now,
some historians like Alex Nov will argue that you should
include people in prisons and so called NKVD special settlements

(51:39):
as well in the number of people in gulags. If
you do that, it brings the number of human beings
incarcerated under Barria's nominal supervision to something like three and
a half million by the outbreak of war. Again, it's
debated how you should consider this. One Soviet source puts
the number. It is still terrifying, two point three million.
This is a lot of nation number, and larger than
several Soviet satellite countries. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
Yeah, it's a significant amount of people are in various
camps and prisons that Barria is running. And the gulags
are not death camps, right. Most people who are in
turn there do survive, and that's important because these are
not the same as what the Nazis are doing.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
But they are not good. Right, you know.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
A death camp, right, right. The goal is not to
wholesale exterminate populations, but that's really the only nice thing
you can say about them, right. A lot of people
still die there. Between thirty four and fifty three, probably
about a million people die in gulags.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
This is debated. It's not a small number though, right.
I think numbers are quite unreliable. It's not like they're
keeping tracks how many people that died, right, right, You're
not going to get a precise count. And how deadly
these places are varies based on what's happening in the
rest of the US. Are in with the war, Right,

(53:01):
During the worst years of the gulag system, some accounts
will say, like a twenty five percent mortality rate, right,
it was usually under ten percent. Now, both of those
are bad, right, those is a good situation. I'm not
trying to mitigate it. But all it changes in terms
of how deadly it is based on what else is
going on right right now. And again, when I say

(53:24):
the purpose of these gulogs is not to eliminate people,
it's because the purpose is to profit from their labor,
and you can really only do that if they're well
enough to work, or at least if most of them
are right. And I'm going to continue with a quote
from Amy Knight's book here. The most important economic activity
of the NKVD was construction of roads, railways, waterways, and
power stations. Some projects were undertaken directly by the NKVD

(53:45):
and some by Gulog workers contracted out to other commissariates.
Mining of gold and nonferest metals and lumbering were other
key areas of production for the Gulag. To have such
a vast economic enterprise under his control was an awesome
responsibility for Barria, though he left the a to day
administration to his lieutenants. According to most accounts, Barria's group
was more effective in the utilization of camp labor than

(54:06):
Yezov's had been. In an effort to raise productivity and
more rationally exploit forced labor, Barria improved physical conditions in
the camps and increased food supplies. As a result, camp
death rates declined from what they were under Azov, and
forced labor became a more productive element of the national economy,
so you could argue compared to how they had been
under his predecessor. Broadly speaking, Gulags are less deadly and

(54:31):
miserable under Barria. And this is pretty consistent with how
he treats, for example, captured Nazi scientists, not out of
the goodness of his heart, because he needs work from them, right,
And he's good at logistics. He's like, well, people who
are starving to death don't work as well, and I
want them to produce economic value for me, right, the
animal of arithmetic, you.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
Know, exactly, exactly, And again these are still not nice places.
In nineteen forty one, and internal report showed that prisoners
that the Gulogs lacked soap, water, clothing, and food, and
were often made to work twelve hour shifts with regularity.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
If you're building roads for sixteen hours, right, why would
you need soap? You know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
In October of nineteen forty one, nearly fifteen hundred people
died at just two in KVD railway construction camps. Former
Gulag prisoner Antov antonov Ovsenko later described Barrio's influence on
the Gulags this way. The Gulags existed before Barria, but
he was the one who built them on a mass scale.
He industrialized the Gulag system. Human life had no value

(55:34):
for him, and you know, human life didn't, labor did.
But later you give him a lot of credit for that, right, Yeah,
of course, of course that's the point is like, it's
not that he made the gulogs more humane, as he
made them more efficient, right, he made them work better,
you know, because why wouldn't you in his situation? But

(55:54):
you know what works really well, Joe? Oh no, you
as a podcast host and author, you want to tell
people where they can find your work.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
Uh yeah. I am the host of the Lines led
by Donkeys podcast. We talked about military history, disasters, and
also occasionally assholes like Barrier. We also did a series
on the Winter War, and we did a series in
the Battle of Stalingrad and several other things that are
loosely connected to this topic. I'm also an author. I'm
currently in the middle of writing a military science fiction

(56:25):
trilogy and you can find it anywhere you find your books.
It's called The Undying Legion.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Hell yeah, check out The Undying Legion. Check out the
Lions led by Donkeys podcast. And look, if you ever
want to start a system of forced labor camps, I
don't know, maybe have a sandwich instead. See if fixing
your blood sugar. Maybe it makes you less want to
run a series of labor camps. I thought I wanted

(56:57):
this labor camp system. It turned out my blood.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
Shirt was well, I'm just getting out hungry. I had
some fruit loops.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
Feeling a lot better now, to be honest, guys, if
only anyway, everybody go to Hell.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
I Love you. Behind the Bastards is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.