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

Beria? I hardly know'ya. Anyway, this is the last episode of the series. Goodbye.

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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. Yeah, we're
trying to help them, you know, get to a safer place,

(00:44):
So please consider donating if you can. Ah, boy, howdy.
You know what I love more than anything is a nice,
good piece and new Hitler news. You know, for whatever reason,
we don't get a lot of that anymore. Baffling as
to why, but I just came across the story's not new,

(01:05):
but it's hit social media the way these things apparently
sometimes do when people realize there's engagement to be gotten.
And the title of this New York Post article, Joe Kassebian,
our guest host of the Lions by Doggies podcast co
host and Sophie, my producer. The headline of this article
is Adolf Hitler's last living relative convicted of pedophilia. Now,

(01:30):
and that we get a picture of like a man
who looks to be in his sixties, with like a
bald head that's entirely a tattoo, very yellow teeth and look, folks,
no one would love it more than me. If there
was there was some new Hitler gossip that made the
family look bad. There's no fresh Hitler article, some fresh hitlerisms.

(01:52):
The first the first line of the article is a
man claiming to be Adolf Hitler's last living relative has
been convicted of pedophilia. And this guy is a creep
and his last name is apparently Hitler. But there's other
there's other Hitler's. He has other living relatives, right like
this guy. Even if this guy is related to Hitler,

(02:12):
which I have not done the work to confirm, he's
not the last Hitler. I mean, I wish he's gonna do.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
You know, when you're convicted, When when you're convicted or
charge of pedophilia, you gotta take some of the heat off,
Like man, anybody googles my name, They're just gonna go
with pedophilia, pedophilia. How can I possibly beat that as
a headline? I know, I'm a Hitler.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
He is the one guy who could mitigate being convicted
of pedophilia. Is like, okay, this is bad, but compared
to my uncle Hitler, well, let's say, you know, like
it always reminds me that, you know, Willie Hitler, Hitler's
nephew retired to Upstate New York after serving in the
US Navy in World War Two and then died and

(02:51):
kept to see he changed his last name to I
think is Stuart Hustin or something like that. You would
want to, you know, if you're not a Hitler.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, And one of his neighbors said, you know what,
like because all it once it came out who he was.
Like then the local news is interviewing all his neighbors,
and one of my favorite lines I think I've ever
read in any local news piece is his neighbors like,
you know what, now that you mentioned it, he did
kind of look like Hitler. He did kind of have
a Hitler vibe doing Yeah, there's Hilary.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
There's another story that's a bit more accurate than this,
which is that all of Hitler's last living relatives agreed
independently not to have kids. Not entirely true. There are
a number of Hitler relatives who are like, probably shouldn't
make any more of this, probably had enough of the Hitler's.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
All the Hitler's gathering around this circle, putting their hands
in and say backshots on.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Three it is. You know, I do actually kind of
feel like maybe it's worse to be like as a Hitler,
I'm not going to have any kids because you're kind
of leaning into his weird attitudes about genetics, because yeah,
Hitler wasn't Hitler. Wasn't Hitler because of his his genes.
He was Hitler because of his Hitler.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
That reminds me of So I can actually talk about
this now because they never made me sign an NDA,
but the History Channel interviewed me to possibly host a
show about Hitler a couple months ago, and man, I
wanted the jobs story, god damn much, and for some
reason it involved me repelling down rock walls and stuff.

(04:22):
I'm not entirely sure why, but they'll share.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
How did you really report on Hitler.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Specifically Hitler's DNA, Like I didn't give a single flying
fuck because the topic is so stupid. But I'm like,
you're telling me I get to be on the History Channel,
repelled on rock walls and it's about dumb shit about
Hitler's DNA.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Just sign me.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
This is like if you told eight year old to
be to get to do this, you'd be fucking ecstatic.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah. Wow, that was a long descent. Speaking of long descents,
let's talk about the last ten years of Hitler's life. Yeah,
there's good ways you could do that. You know, Joe,
everybody he loves talking Hitler. Not everybody loves talking Hitler,
but enough people do that. It's a pretty reliable source
of content for a number of people.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
And never in this shows for people who do a
job like me and you, is a never ending font
of content.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah, he really has done the podcasters and History Channel
documentary producers of the world a solid Speaking of things,
people love to talk about World War Two. Now, I
don't think it's controversial to say most people who have
a favorite war that war's World War Two, right, And
people love talking World War Two for the same reason

(05:36):
that Warhammer forty thousand is now the most profitable export
in British history. It's got a little bit of everything, right.
And if the experience you're looking for in a war
is an almost Michael Scott like story of executive incompetence
leading to disaster and unbelievable awkwardness, well the Big Dub
Dub does has that one in spades. Brother. And this

(05:58):
brings me back to the story of Joe of Stalin
and his buddies, which now includes Lavnti Barria as an
integral member and at this point pretty experienced ethnic cleanser.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Right.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
He's good at deportations. He's done a lot of practice. Right, Yeah,
he's up there, right, top ten percent of deporters in
the world at this moment, right, almost unquestionably. And you know,
nineteen forty, nineteen forty one, prior to Operation Barbarassa, everybody
in Stalin's inner circle, almost everybody. We'll talk about malatav

(06:32):
In a second, but most of the people in Stalin's
inner circle, including Stalin, no, some kind of conflict is
coming with the Nazis, right Stalin though, And again when
people say that and that's accurate, they often mean that
to be like, everyone knew that a war like World
War II was for Russia was coming and they did not. Right,
Stalin would not have made a lot of the choices

(06:52):
he made if he felt like the World War Two
that Russia got was right in the office, right, Yeah,
he'd probably be a little bit less pergy, a little
less pergy, a little more, have some kind of effective
defenses set up for the Wehrmacht, you know, e a
little less keep his entire air force grounded so it
gets blown up on the tarmacx E. You know, couple

(07:14):
of things he might have done.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Kills so many pilots they can't even fucking fly effectively.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Some changes would have been made. Right. And when I
say that, like Stalin doesn't know the war that's coming
is coming, it's part of what I'm saying is because
Stalin is certain a conflicts coming, but he thinks they've
got years before anything happens. Right, he thinks they've got
we've got enough time to rebuild the Red Army from
the purges, and not just to do that, but when
the USSR moves west to take eastern Poland, to take

(07:43):
all these like Baltic states, right, Stalin has his troops
disassemble the fortifications on their western border. Right because he
wants to move those up, right. He doesn't want there
to not be fortifications. But he's like, well, we'll take
these apart and we'll rebuild a defensive line closer to
the new border right with the West. We just move
forward a lot. But there's like an awkward period in

(08:06):
between taking apart the fortifications that had existed and getting
the new ones up. And they're not going to have
that new set of fortifications up by July of nineteen
forty one, when the Nazis unleash Operation Barbarossa, which is
still the largest military operation in the history of mankind
hopefully always will be. I want to see it get beat. Yeah,

(08:29):
always going to put star like that. Yeah, you don't
attempt anybody into beating the Guinness Book of World Records
like the execution Now you get to close it up.
Oh god, I would love to see the Guinness Book
of World Records entry for that though, just based on
the executioner one. Yeah. While Stalin is convinced that there's

(08:49):
going to be a fight and Hitler's obviously got one plan,
there's this awkward innerstittle period in late nineteen forty where
Molotov as the USSR's foreign policy guy and is the
dumbest guy who's close to Stalin. I don't know if
that's generally agreed by historians myriad having read a couple
books about these guys. Molotov was kind of the dipshit

(09:10):
of the crew, right.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
He doesn't seem like the sharpest sickle of the hammer.
You know, he is not the best of them, right,
And Molotov is kind of notably the guy who is
most convinced that, like we actually might be able to
ally with the Nazis to fight the British. You know,
he has kind of a fantasy that this might be possible.
And he has this fantasy because Joaquing von Ribbentrop, who's

(09:33):
his opposite I mean again.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
It's the Molotov Ribbon Tromp packed, right. People are aware
of this, Yeah, Joaquim von ribin Tropp, his opposite number
in Germany, has kind of like incepted this idea that like, oh,
you know what, I know, our bosses don't get along,
but like I feel like Hitler might let the USSR
in the tripartheid pack. You could be member number four.
You could be on a team with heavy hitters like

(09:56):
Italy come on Italy.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
You know notable military mass friends Benito Mussolini.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
You know who always pulls their weight in twentieth century war.
The Italians, guys, don't worry. They can't possibly switch sides
on us again. It is very funny. Italy is like
the case study of a country this amazing period of
like utter military dominance and then just never gets their

(10:23):
shit together again for a thousand years. I'm being a
little unfair to a couple of the city states, but
it's for the purposes of comedy. I don't think. I
don't think anyone really thinks there was ever a serious
possibility of like the USSR and the Nazis allying against
the British in a realistic way, right, But Molotov thinks

(10:44):
it might be possible for a while now again he's
not fully convinced of this, and Ribin Trop it's kind
of a back and forth with trying to like keep
Molotov on board with the idea, and Ribin Trap, who's
also a little bit of a dipshit nearly has a
panic attack because, like Molotov is in Berlin, they're they're
talking all this through and the British launch an air

(11:05):
raid and you know, Rippentrop is like, don't worry Molotov,
the Brits are already beat And in a rare moment
of lucidity, Molotov asks, well, then who is dropping the
bombs on us? If you've got the British on the ropes,
who is bombing your capital? Which, to be fair to Molotov,
that's not a bad question in the moment to ask

(11:26):
that'll buff out. It's a little buff out of Berlin.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
I have the last gasp from a dying empire carpet
bombing the capitol. It's war, right, Your.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Capital is gonna get a little completely destroyed in a
way that very few cities in history have ever been destroyed.
But hey, it comes with sixties. It's going to be great.
It's great for real estate prices, ask Roterdom. Yeah, yeah,
Roderdam's gonna eventually be doing very well. So this does
not deal directly with Barriya, but I found it pass

(12:00):
and Sheila Fitzpatrick's book on Stalin's team that I enjoyed
too much not to share. Malatav had a meeting with
Hitler too, and observed with interest that he was trying
to do propaganda on him. Evidently he was very one sided,
an extreme nationalist as Chauvins, who is blinded by his ideas,
which is not a bad description of Hitler. I just
find the Hitler's doing propaganda on me. Imagine that from Hitler.

(12:26):
You think this guy shouldn't have propaganda me. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
He seems like such an honest customer. Every other time.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
Propaganda from a Hitler. No. So, Barry's actual role in
this period pretty obvious. As the USSR spymaster, he is
responsible for ferrying beams of information to Stalin that make
it very clear the Germans are about to invade. There's
a lot of data on this, right, They had no
good realon and Barria, I mean not to his credit

(12:54):
because of what he's about to do is not handle
this the best way he can. But Barria has plenty
of info to be like, well, yeah, obviously they're about
to fucking invade, right, Like they have three million men
masked on the border. This is not the hardest thing
to figure out.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
They're just camping. You know how the Germans love fresh air.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah, I he love tens. He loves the ground. It's
very nice. My German accent terrible anyway. So this is
a dangerous position to be in because Stalin has already
made up his mind that the Germans are not going
to invade right yet. You know, so, Bary it you
can't just go to Stalin and be like, you're wrong,
they're obviously about to invade, because telling Stalin he's wrong

(13:32):
is a great way to wind up not alive anymore,
you know. So Mary has got to thread the needle
of he has to warn Stalin because when they do invade,
you don't want Stalin to be like, where was the
fucking evidence of this, right? Why didn't you? You also
have to set it up in a way that you're
not saying I told you so, because he'll just kill
you right this. This is a tough to be fair

(13:56):
to bury you. That's a hard position to be in.
You know, there's no inforgen.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Waiting inline to be the one that finally gets to
kill Barria, like, oh please let him fuck up.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, they've got like a ton teene going now. In
a memo written just days before the invasion, Barria laid
out a huge number of warning signs that one was imminent,
before concluding with forced cheer that since Stalin had figured
out nothing was going to happen. It was all probably fine.
It is kind of a masterclass and ass covering. But
part of protecting his own ass was that Barria had

(14:28):
to attack the military officers who were trying to warn
Stalin and the intelligence officers who were trying to provide warnings.
Right And in his book, Sangster writes, quote, Barria also
knew the facts and was worried about an attack in
the Caucasus oil fields. It amounted to a curious problem
because such was the fear of Stalin that no one
wanted to disagree with him or even suggest he was
wrong or upset him. Barria went so far as to

(14:51):
accuse the head of military intelligence of being a liar,
even though his own information backed those observations. Now, I
think the funniest maybe example of how deranged things get
is that, like obviously Germany had a lot of communists
before the Nazis win, a lot of those communists just
kind of sink back into the woodwork, the ones who
are not prominent enough that they're going to get purged

(15:11):
or at least not going to spend too long in
a camp. Right, A lot of guys get put in
a you know what are called wild concentration camps for
a while and they have a bad time, but they
eventually get out and an east number of these guys
get drafted into the Wehrmont later, right, and some of
these significant number I think of these guys in the
lead up to Operation Barbarosa are like, well, I don't
want to invade Russia. I am still a communist, and

(15:35):
they sneak across the border to try and warn the Russians, right,
to try to warn Comrade Stalin, like, hey, guys, the
fascists are coming, right, assuming.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
The immediately seriously and nothing bad happens to these loyal
German communists.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
They are treated as spies. That's what you get for
trying to stop Operation Barbarossa Damn. On June twenty second,
nineteen forty one, some three million Germans, complete with a
lot of tanks and trucks but even more horses, cross
the Soviet border and start committing war crimes like there
was a shortage at the war crime store, which is
just a TJ Max. In the first few days, the

(16:12):
Wehrmacht encountered minimal resistance and Soviet losses were nightmarishly like
high enough. Basically pretty much any other country in the
history of the world would have collapsed from the kind
of casualties the Soviets are taking in these early days
of barbarosso right, like they are using the entire modern
day active duty strength of the US Army, and some

(16:32):
of these engagements in terms of like captured, right primarily.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
The only time you ever read about casualty numbers quite
like this is reading about like, I don't know, any
war involving China.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Right right, right, yeah, like the the the War over
the Heavenly Kingdom, the Hong Kong or Taipei Rebellion Kingdom,
which a series of about kingdom.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Right, thanks for that, layup, Robert, Yeah, these are unthinkable.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
Like again, the entire US would collapse if we had
losses like this. It's impossible to really comprad what casualties
that we suffer today.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
Oh the entire population of Cleveland.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
Yeah yeah, we lost to Portland out there, sorry, guys.
Most of San Francisco just got captured. So Barria had
given out orders, you know kind of because again there
the ver not just not the Wehrmacht, but the Luftwaffa
is doing like some cross border air reconnaissance and stuff

(17:32):
in the days leading up to this, right, and on
the day of the attack, right, Obviously, planes are heading
in a lot of areas ahead of the ground troops.
They're doing attacks, they're bombing airfields. And because it's it's
unclear initially is this an invasion, is there some sort
of fuck up? I mean, it's pretty clear to people
who are not blinkered by, you know, not wanting to
anger Stalin what's happening. But Barria, acting on Stalin's orders,

(17:56):
orders that Soviet troops not fire on these planes that
have crossed in the Soviet air space because like Stalin
doesn't want to provoke a fight, right, little laid on
the draw there, j Stall. Maybe they're just lost, Yeah,
maybe they're just lost and bombing our airfields mistakenly. Maybe
they think they're their own airfields and they just need
to get rid of some planes. It happens after his

(18:19):
fallen execution, Barry was denounced as a trader in Soviet
history books for this. But this is not really fair.
This is the only time I'll say this. That's not
really fair to bury you. As Sangster points out, Barria
had in fact Warren Stalin on June twelfth, writing that
in a few instances they the German aircraft had penetrated
sixty miles or more in the direction of military installations

(18:39):
and large troop concentrations. Stalin appeared paralyzed and decided not
to blink in case it provoked the Germans really bad call.
I think we can all agree here.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Don't look, I understand that they're bombing us. Maybe it's
some misunderstanding that only exists in the warped brain of
pre stroke Stalin.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Yeah, yeah, hope, maybe pre stroke Stalin. We don't know
when that first one hit, right, He may throwing a
blood clot at this point. Yeah, he in a couple
of clots.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
So what they say about j stall really clatty.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
Really claudi fella. Now, depending on who you ask after
the invasion, like in the immediate aftermath of the invasion,
Stalin either has this panic attack or just a mental collapse,
or he executes a complex face saving plan based on
Russian history, And the truth is probably kind of all
of the above. Right, we do know that he is panicked,
and not hard to see why. If three million Germans

(19:38):
invaded me, I would probably be a little worried.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Right, you normally you have to pay for that kind
of treatment. No, I had three invade me at a
hostel once, and it was a real problem until I
found out they had mally. Then things got a lot better,
but it was rough for a little while. Let me
tell you now, we know Stalin was furious for once
it himself. Right, he has this line where he's like,
we including himself in this like foolishly squandered Lenin's great inheritance.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Right, there's like this moment where he's like he can't deny, like, oh,
this is a real this is a real fuck up
on my part.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
This could have gone a lot better, Guys, I kind
of dropped the ball on this one, you know.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
What, I've fucked up a bit here. And he immediately
flees the Kremlin for his country house, where he locks
himself away for the rest of the government for I
think like a week, and you have to presume he
gets the kind of drunk that no one else has
ever gotten. Right, this is probably a unique level of
fucked up, Like this is a Sherman invasion.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah, it's it's uh, you know, the doctor Manhattan floating
on the Moon's surface level of enlightened drunk.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Now, the people who will say like he was also
kind of doing he was he was he was in
his reaction to the invasion directly sort of sign posting
some stuff from Russian history will point out that like
even the Terrible who is the ruler of Usia from
like fifteen forty seven to fifteen eighty four, had fucked
up in a pretty huge and obvious public way himself,

(21:06):
and when he did in the wake of it, he
like fled to hide alone so that his nobles could
come and find him and beg him to come back right.
And this is sort of like he felt like there
was this need for him to be like, I made
a mistake and them to say, we still want you
to run things right. I don't sure. I'm not enough
of an expert on like why that was necessary. But

(21:27):
people will argue that by sort of fleeing to his
datcha like this, Stalin was doing the same thing. And
I don't see why that wouldn't be part of his calculus, right.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
It makes more sense than a man like Stalin to
have like a complete emotional breakdown. Sure, he's not really
a man that felt emotions.

Speaker 1 (21:45):
Right and I don't see why it can't be both,
why he can't be Like, I'm really fucked up, and
maybe this is the end for me, but also maybe
my best chance is to like do this thing that
there's already kind of like a precedent for in history, right,
A little bit, a little bit, a little bit from Colin,
a lot from a lot from Vodka. Now, you know,

(22:06):
in Ivan the Terrible's case, the nobles are I'm guessing
they were his boyers. I think that's the term you
know for it. In Stalin's case, the nobles that have
to come and like ask him to retake the reins
of power are his circle of buddies. And this is
going to include our boy Barria. And so they all
show up at the Datcha, and Barria, before they show
up at the Datcha to go pick Stalin up off

(22:28):
of his sick puddle in the floor, Barry is like,
we should form a new organization, the State Defense Committee,
to organize the war effort. And what'll really makes Stalin,
what'll really pick him up, like perk him up, is
if we make him the head of this thing before
we come and get him right. Come on again, in charge,
Come on, buddy, one thing you got to give him.
You know, not every bastard is the best at something

(22:50):
I've ever heard of. He might be the best ass
kisser I've ever heard of. You know, he's tongue deep
in the Yeah, you're right, You're right, he is. He
has passed the colon. He's like the Geene Simmons up
and there he is.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Feasting like he's at a golden corral of ass, which
is just.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
A golden corral. So Barry and everybody else they all
travel to Stalin's Datcha to a share him. Hey, buddy,
we still love you, right, we still want you to
be our czar effectively, right, And Barry is like, and look, man,
we made this whole new committee. You're in charge of it.
Don't you want to come back and maybe we all
do a World War two together? And Stalin he kind

(23:32):
of like looks down at the floor, and he looks
up at his buds and like the music, the heartwarming
music starts to play and he's like, yeah, let's do
a World War two. And then everybody hugs. You know,
I it was three days from retirement. I do kind
of want a World War II. Stalin's Inner Circle movie,

(23:54):
but starring the main two characters from the Lethal Weapon franchise.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
Oh my god, yeah, I mean to be fair, Mel
Gibson is anti Semitic enough to play Joseph Stalin.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Honestly, he could be either of them, right, yeah, yeah,
So the reality is that everybody gets back to work,
you know, in relatively short order, but not in a
way that is initially effective or efficient. Again, these guys
have a lot of skills, right, They're not bad at
everything that they do. Barria is the stuff we've talked
about him doing in terms of organizing these deportations and

(24:27):
mass executions. They're bad things to do, but he does
them competently. None of them really know how to wage
the largest war in the history of human experience, right,
which just quite a task. Yeah, you got you gotta
figure you gotta pick up the ropes as you go along. Right,
we can't all be George S. Patton, the reincarnation of Hannibal.

(24:50):
What a beautiful maniac. We'll talk about him one of
these days. He's got an episode or two. Real bastard,
right about the one, Garren, but wrong about everything else. True.
So Stalin's first instinct, because things are going very badly
for the USSR is to try and sue for peace.
He has a lot of territory, and he's like, if
Hitler just wants land, I'll give him some fucking land.

(25:13):
Can we work this out right, I've got a lot
of Retsia. I can afford the burn. You know, you
want some Baltics, you want the Baltics, you want some
of Ukraine. Take it. I didn't even want it. Zukov
visits shortly after the invasion, being one of the few
guys who's in the military incompetent that's left alive, and

(25:33):
he meets with Barria and Stalin and it's again, you know,
any report you have from inside the inner circle in
this period is imperfect. I trust Zukov more than most
of these guys, not that he doesn't have some face
saving to do, but I trust him more than most
of them. And he claims that when he meets with
these guys, they are both like in panic mode and
convinced that victory is impossible right the doom, saying Berry

(25:57):
and Stalin are both so like black pilled on their
chances that at one point Zukov has to ask, Comrade Stalin,
do I have permission to do my job. Right, You
are clearly panicking too much to handle anything, right now?
Can I go do a war? Right? Silence descends upon
the room after this, and just a few months later,

(26:18):
this would have ended with Zukov shot in a ditch, right,
but Baria. All that happens in this case is barry.
It just kind of gives this limp warning that, like, well,
the opinion of the party is important, the party being Stalin,
and Zu guy's like, I fuck about that right now? Man, Like,
do you want to win this fucker or not? You know,
there's not going to be a party in a three weeks. Yeah,

(26:40):
So obviously this is not a military history podcast. There's
plenty of places where you can go to read about
how the situation in the East gets turned around. Well
it's not the East to Stalin, it's largely the west,
but you get you know what I'm saying. While millions
upon millions of people are dying fighting the Nazis, life
gets a lot better for Burrio. World War two is

(27:01):
really good for him because of all of the people
close to Stalin, he's one of the guys who's kind
of most useful in this situation, right, because he's a
logistics guy, you know, and prior to the outbreak of war,
the security agencies had already been fairly centralized, and once
the war really kicks, everything gets centralized within the NKVD,

(27:21):
which makes him unequivocally the most powerful security chief in
the history of like almost any country, there's not a
whole lot of competition, and.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
There's even elements during World War Two where the NKVD
has its own military formations and Baria patently refuses to
allow the Red Army to command them, and he has
the power to do so.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
He sure does, and he's not going to be great
at that part. But what he is good at he
is kind of one of the guys who's in charge
of this very famous effort to basically disassemble all of
these Soviet heavy factories that are producing war material and
move them east right so they can get reset up.
And he's because he's so good at logistics. He's one
of the guys organizing this in a big way, right,

(28:02):
And he's from at least what I've read, seems to
have been competent in this kind of stuff. He does
a lot of in addition to running security, a lot
of because a lot of like what the NKVD armed
units are doing is ensuring that like supplies get places right,
because obviously you need soldiers doing that to some extent,
and I don't think he's incompetent at this now. In
addition to all of the practical shit that he's doing,

(28:23):
Barrya finds time to get up to some hideously evil
bullshit as well. The vulgar regions. Of course he does.
This is our boy barrier we're talking about here.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
You know, he's not going to shelve his hobbies during
a whole world he's surrounded by death. This is what
he was built for.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
Yeah, yeah, this is what he was built for, just
like our audience was built to be advertised too. So
take out your credit card, marry it to me. I'll
buy some stuff for you or for me, you know,
for some people. And bury a coin. M Yeah, bury
a coin our our new crypto currency. We're back and

(29:09):
my Burier coin is now worth I don't know, seven
negant revolvers or almost thirty five dollars, So that's pretty great.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
I feel like the instructions are unclear in bury a
coin for people who don't know you can actually use
three slurp juices on your bury a coin.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
M Yeah, and that's how you get a Melankov. I
don't know, I don't know. Maybe I'm not sure how
this would work. I'm not really sure how we how
we would to play this now, in addition to all
of the practical shift this day again, so the Vulgar
region includes a semi autonomous kind of German republic. It's
what it's called semi autonomous. Right, this is a part

(29:46):
of the USSR, but it's not a part of the USSR.
That's stall in trust prior to the war. And because
these people are like ethnically German, this isn't gonna be.
That's not a good time to be an ethnic German
in the Soviet Union. Right, probably don't need to explain
why Baria has NKVD men dress up as German paratroopers
and land and towns in this area to test the

(30:08):
loyalty of German ethnicity citizens. Their reaction, which I think
is like the normal reaction of civilians to soldiers swarming
are area, which is like, please don't kill me, I'll
do whatever. Right, It's the way most people act in
this situation. Yeah, Yeah, Their reaction was used as a
pretext to abolish this quote unquote autonomous republic and forcibly

(30:29):
ship hundreds of thousands of Volga Germans East, mostly to
Siberia or Kazakhstan. This is going to prove to be again,
there's this other frenzy of deportations that hadn't really ended
from like the wave we talked about last episode, but
millions more people are deported because they're considered traders by
DNT of their ancestry, and of course these brutal actions

(30:50):
forcing these people thousands and thousands of folks die right.
Amy Knight writes this about that period of deportations. Barr
A's matter of fact reports, of course, reveal nothing of
the human suffering that was wrought by this many Holocaust
Tens of thousands, including women, children, and old people perished
while they were being transported like cattle in overcrowded railway
cars without water or food. In the process of shipping

(31:12):
the Chechens in Engush, the NKVD had decided that it
could make do with fewer railway cars by crowding forty
five instead of forty persons into each carriage, a perfectly
reasonable decision. He observed since almost half the contingent were children.
He added that they had also been compelled to do
without sanitation facilities, and consequently an epidemic of typhus had
broken out. One of those who survived the trip later

(31:32):
described it in cattle cars filled to overflowing without lighter water.
We traveled for almost a month to our destination. Typhus
was having a heyday. There was no medicine during the
shortstops at lonely uninhabited stations. We buried our dead near
the train and snow that was black from engine soot.
It was forbidden, with punishment of death, to go more
than five meters from the train. Many more died of

(31:53):
famine disease once they had reached their destination. So not good. Yeah,
bad stuff, you'd say. And in terms of how Barria
feels about this human catastrophe that he's overseeing, we have
his constant notes to Stalin suggesting that he should be
awarded for the stunning successes he'd experienced in doing ethnic cleansings.

(32:13):
The war years were indeed good for Barria, but he
had a constant annoyance. By necessity, the military was given
a great deal of independence and latitude because you kind
of need them, right, You can't fuck with them the
same way when they're actually the only thing stopping the
Nazis and they even purge officers anymore, right, Right, that
is Barry's attitude, right, because guys like Zookov are increasingly

(32:36):
allowed to make major calls and even questioned Stalin's judgment
and barry Is judgment, and that's going to piss off
both Barria and Stalin. Barria does continuously through the war
try to force his way into making military command decisions,
and this is something he's always bad at. In October
of nineteen forty one, Soviet pilots spotted German troops advancing

(32:56):
on Moscow. Barria took the photographs and hid them, telling
everyone they were warmongering and trying to cause a panic.
Sangster notes that time and time again, Barria tried to
threaten his way into giving orders to the military, and
the military has to go to Stalin to be like,
can you fucking get this guy in pocket, Like you

(33:16):
know how bad things are right now, it's October of
forty one.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
Look, Joe, can you point this guy towards another minority
that needs to be sent to Kazakhstans will leave us
alone for another two weeks, have him do.

Speaker 1 (33:28):
Another crime against humanity. We're we've got some shit to
handle here now. One of Barry's more ridiculous blunders came
during the height of the fighting, when every rifle was
needed and Barrus sought to equip a bunch of his troops.
These NKVD soldiers guarding rear areas far from the fighting
with the very best weaponry, right, because the Soviets are

(33:48):
starting to produce what are legitimately going to be some
of the best guns of the war. Right, some of
these like first automatic rifles and stuff that are kind
of in wide circulation, and they don't initially have a
lot of these, and they're kind of all needed. But
Barria wants the shiny toys for his guys, even though like, well,
some dude who's actually going to be shooting a bunch
of Germans should probably have these guns before your guys, Right,

(34:09):
you're like guarding a train station maybe, And when Voronov,
who's a top general, informs Stalin of this, Barria whispers
to Voronov, just you wait, will fix your guts.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Sure, such as does sounds like it could be simultaneously
a threat or the worst pickup line I've ever.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Heard, right, right, yeah, Now, Barrier reserves a special hatred
for Georgie Zukov because Zukov reasonably good at being a general.
Right there's again, like anyone who's in this position, a
number of valid criticisms of his command choices here. But
he's not an idiot, you know.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
Certainly one of the top two that the Soviet Union
produces between him and Bogramia and right right.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
And he's in the same set. I would compare him
in some ways to a guy like Grant, where there's
time where you can say, like, he's just throwing men
into a meat grinder, but also like, well, I don't know,
there weren't that was probably unavoidable to some extent. We
can argue how much less it could have been. But
he's in a tough situation. I wouldn't have wanted his job.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Like sometimes sometimes a meat grinder is your only choice.
We did a series in the Battle of Kurskill a
while ago, and this is like, oh no, this is
like a solid battle plan. As long as one of
the checklist is like we can we can lose a
lot more people than you can, which is a legit
a military strategy. It's just it looks really bad on paper.

(35:35):
Later on, yeah it's ugly, but it's World War two, right,
like Zukov is. And because of this, Zukov is even
after the war, he's not totally impervious, like he takes
some hits after the war, right, but even after the war,
he can't be purged in the same way other guys
can because he's fucking.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
Zukov, right, you know, and hates this right. This scares
the shit out of Stalin, and Barry is kind of
just jealous beyond words at the guy. In May of
nineteen forty five, as things are winding down and the
Red Army enters Berlin, it becomes clear that the time
of greatest threat was well passed. Right, Stalin can get

(36:15):
back to tightening his grip on power, and these military
guys have a little bit less clout because we're not
really at risk of losing anymore. Right, So Barya starts
to kind of try to push to get back to
murdering anyone competent to posing a threat to whatever bullshit
he wants to pull. And as a result of this,
Zukov winds up in both Stalin and Barria's sites, and
I'm going to quote from Amy Knight here. Barria managed

(36:38):
to get his deputy, Ivan Serov, appointed Zukov's assistant, serving
as chief of the Civilian Administration the Soviet Zone of Germany. Henceforth,
reports began to trickle back to Stalin about Zukov, that
he was boasting about his victories and even that he
was planning a military conspiracy against Stalin. Bary's men also
did all they could to keep important information hidden from Zukov.
It turns out, for example, that he was not told

(37:00):
that Hitler's body had been found. He did not know
that autopsies were carried out and an investigation launched to
confirm the identity as well as the cause of death,
which is like wild considering what Zukov's job is at
this time, that you're not letting him know that you've
autopsied to Hitler. All of this culminates and Jay Stall
denouncing our boy Zukov near the end of forty five

(37:21):
during a meeting at the Kremlin. Zukov notably is not
at that meeting, but he has eventually summoned to stand
before the war Council and made to answer for his crimes.
It is sometimes suggested that Stalin wanted to have him executed,
and he kind of floats this to the other military
leaders of the USSR, and they're like, what the fuck
are you talking about, man Zukov. You want to kill Zukov? Now,

(37:43):
that's not going to work out, And it says a
lot about his position that Stalin has to back off
on this right. Some of this might just be the
fact that like Eisenhower and Zukov are legitimately buddies. One
of my favorite cute facts of the war is that,
like they get along so well that, like Zukov gets
shipped Coca Cola. I think for the rest of his life.

(38:04):
That's made just.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
For him, if I remember correctly. He also Eisenharer also
gives Zukov like a fishing kit that he used a box,
yeah for he uses for the rest of his life.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
It's if I'm not mistaken. The tackle box that Eisenheer
gives him is by his bedside when he dies, which
suggests like it's not really hard because like Eisenhower and
Zukov are like the only two guys that can understand
being in that position.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yeah, they're gonna they're gonna get along great.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, I'm not surprised they had some things in common.
So during the war, Baria also makes clever use of
the Gulag system that he had helped to build or
at least helped to expand, in order to further Soviet
war aims in a way that furthered his career. And
this is possible because prior to the outbreak of hostilities,
a lot of people who had been arrested and taken
into custody were scientists, engineers, and physicists, and Baria, again

(38:53):
not a dumb man, knows that he doesn't want to
kill these people because you get you can get officer
who are okay or at least train them up. You
can replace political men, you can't really replace genius scientists
and physicists easily, right, Yeah, So he keeps a lot
of these guys in pocket. He has like special prisons
for them that are certainly a lot safer than the

(39:15):
other prisons. And when the war really gets running, he
gets these guys working designing new weapons systems and stuff
for the Soviet Union. And that's one of the things
that gives Barry a lot of clout in this period
is he has a lot of these guys who had
been kind of, you know, out of favor prior to
the war, and he's, you know, he's able to get
them working. A lot of these guys get their sentences commuted,

(39:38):
right because they're so necessary. And this is going to
really play into what happens next because barry Is direct
involvement in the production of war materiel is evidence of
not just his general cunning, but his understanding that his
position is based on continually putting himself directly in front
of Comrad Stalin's eyes at all times. Whatever Stalin is
focused on, Stalin's focused on the war. I need to

(39:59):
be making shit for the war. At least I need
to be facilitating the making of shit for the war, right,
because that's the way to maintain my position after the war.
I don't know if you're aware of this shoe. It
ends in the Pacific with the US dropping a couple
of nuclear bombs, right, I think I've heard of it. Yeah,
kind of a big deal. The fact that we do
this and when we drop these bombs, there's a strong

(40:21):
argument to be made that the primary reason reason we
do drop them is to make a big show of
force to the Soviet Union. Right. This is heavily debatable.
I certainly don't. Some people will make the claim that
is not supported that like, oh, Japan was right about
to surrender without it, and like, no, they were like
trying to float this thing whereby the emperor would stay
the emperor and they'd get to handle their war criminals

(40:42):
on their own. Not really the same.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Yeah, they were not agreeing to unconditional surrender, which was
the I believe since Yalta was the main and only
acceptance of things. Yeah, there's many layers to the atomic bombing, right,
And none of this is saying the atomic bombing is
a feed of a whole crime.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
I'm not saying that.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah, but there is, especially when you look into you know,
Operation Downfall, which would have been the mainland invasion of Japan,
which would have been significantly worse and also still included
nuclear weapons, right, you know, almost could have been some
point strophically worse.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
All of that can be true, and also true that
we drop those bombs in large part because we wanted
to make a point to the Russians, right, yeah, yeah,
those at the same time, right, and what becomes clear
to the Stalin and to everybody who's not who's like
has any level of like, I don't know intellect at
this point is that once the US has dropped nukes,

(41:39):
the Soviet Union's going to need nukes of their own
right very quickly to see how they get to that
and look like, the whole lesson of the twenty first
century is, never give up your nukes. If the Ussa's
piss statue right, or if Russia is pissed at you, you're.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Generally like a solid bullet proofst to have as a nation. Yeah,
if you have them, keep the fuckers right. I don't
love that that's.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
The lesson of the twenty first century, but it's hard
to argue with.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
And that's why I personally never gave up my nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Now I'm not a person in my desk yeah, yeah,
you know, I just keep one on me at all times.
I like to strap it to my bicycle when I
go cycling. You know, people give me a wide berth.
It's part of myself everyday. Carry yeah yeah, nuke, yeah, flashlight,
just the basics. If you were tasked with the job

(42:27):
of developing a nuclear arsenal for your country, neighborhood, or household.
What's your first.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Step going to be, Oh, to spy on the people
who already have one?

Speaker 1 (42:35):
Well, yeah, that is actually exactly what happens, right, And
that's why Stalin is going to eventually appoint Barrier to
handle this job. Right, And it's not hard again, very
it makes a lot of sense. Barry is not just
a talented organizer. He's proved he's good at kind of
the materiel game, and that's a part of figuring out
how to make a nuke. He's also pretty good at
building a team to like accomplish a goal, and he's

(42:57):
also pretty good at massacring those teams, you know, when
they need to be massacred. Barria is also the spymaster,
and a lot of the Soviet bomb ambitions are going
to be shall we say, floated by their ability to
infiltrate the nuclear weapons programs of the United States and
the United Kingdom. Right, So Barry is actually appointed to
head up the Soviet Adam bomb project on August seventh,

(43:19):
nineteen forty five, the day after the US bomb Hiroshima,
and he creates a new department at the NKVD Department
s which is going to host the agency's nuclear research efforts.
This is not the beginning of Soviet efforts of developing
towards developing a bomb. Of course, the Soviet Union does
not lack for skilled scientists. In as early as nineteen forty,
Soviet physicist Ai Kirschhatov had given a report to the

(43:41):
Academy of Sciences about how a theoretical nuclear weapon might work.
Petr Kapitska, who is I think probably the most famous
Soviet physicist of the era, had brought the matter up
again in nineteen forty one. And the main reason the
USSR falls so far behind the US on this research
is they get invaded, right. That throws a little bit
of a wrench in things that'll slow down. We might

(44:03):
not have been able to do the things that we
were doing if we were like fighting the Nazis and
the Sandias, you know, probably would have been a little
harder to establish that facility. Oppenheimer would have been a
different movie, as much nudity, but differently shot. You know,
still would watch it, still would watch it. So to
help make up for this gap that's caused by the

(44:24):
fact that they're fighting this war, Barria spymaster for the
USSR starts collecting and disseminating nuclear secrets from the British,
US and German nuclear programs. This is something he's doing
all throughout World War Two right now. One of his
best s buies is a guy named Klaus Fuchs, who
missed his true calling in a join in joining the
adult film industry and thus was forced to study mathematics

(44:46):
and physics. At age nineteen, he joined the German Communist Party,
which was difficult because he happened to turn nineteen in
nineteen thirty, a notably bad time to be a German Communist.
Great to the Nazis. Yeah really, really, we add timing
on turning nineteen fucks Fuchs. Whatever. So, when the Nazis
takeover a few years later, Fuchs deports himself over to

(45:08):
England and he gets a job as the research assistant
to a professor of physics. He receives his PhD in
nineteen thirty seven in physics, and then he gets another
PhD at the University of Edinburgh just for fun. He
applies for British citizenship at this point, but is a
little late on the draw. Failing to beat the outbreak
of war, he was interned in Quebec for a spell
before one of his professors pull strings to let him out,

(45:30):
basically being like, we're trying to build nukes. The British
Adam Bomb project, which is under the code name Tube Alloys,
starts in like you know, around this time, and in
May of nineteen forty one, he gets kind of brought
out of internment to work on this project. Right, So
Fuchs's work got him. I'm basing this on the character
from Barry. I assume it's pretty close to that.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, I assume it's the same. They even look probably similar.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
It's fine, it's probably played by the same actor. In
my heart at least. So Fuchs's work gets him British
citizenship in late nineteen forty two, and it's one of
those things where he's a great scientist and what a reward, Yeah,
becoming British. Yeah, congratulations, you're now a British citizen. Like,
can I go to Canada? Stough? Yeah, not going to

(46:17):
be Canadian. Maybe. As soon as he gets this job,
he starts working as a spy for the GRU right
or for I think it's the I guess the KGB.
At this point, I forget. I always mix up my
spy agencies again, they go through a bunch of them
at this point, right, But he's handing Soviet spies classified
information about British nuclear ambitions right, kind of through the
whole war period. And he's really good at this, right,

(46:40):
He's good enough at this that not only does no
one notice that he's spying on the British nuclear weapons
program for the Soviet Union, but he gets transferred to
Los Alamos to help the Americans with their much cooler
Adam bomb. There he calculates the YU I think he's
the first guy to calculate the yield of an atomic
blast and like a precise manner, and he studies implosion methods.

(47:02):
He's one of the people who's there to see the
Trinity test in person. And he continues spying during this
whole period of time, which he sees as his duty
to the cause of global communism. As Russia's spymaster, or
at least one of them. Barria oversaw the project of
using Fuchs and several other spies who were close to
the project. I found an article published by Columbia University's

(47:23):
Atomic Heritage Foundation that notes Fuchs also passed detailed information
about the hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union. Some experts
estimate that Fuchs's intelligence enabled the Soviets to develop and
test their own at atomic bomb one to two years
earlier than otherwise expected, and there's a little debate about this.
I think the US is kind of saying at the

(47:43):
end of World War Two, the Soviets will probably have
their own bomb by nineteen fifty three somewhere around there.
Obviously they beat that by several years, and forty eight
is when they do it, And it's pretty widely agreed
it's because they have a lot of really good intel
from their spies, right, that this definitely moves up the timeframe.
And if I remember correctly, with the first Soviet nuke

(48:04):
is effectively a copy of like one for one copy
of the American one. Yeah, in a lot of ways
it is. I'm not enough of an expert on nukes
to lay into that, but it's widely agreed that all
of the spying that Barrier is managing moves forward the
timeframe on this significantly. Right, It's possible maybe Stalin doesn't
live to see a Soviet nuke without the spying program, right.

(48:27):
I don't know how likely that is, but it's possible,
And when it comes to the morality of doing this,
it's kind of something I can't really fault them for, right,
Like I don't like nukes. I think it's bad that
either Trump or Putin right now could end all civilization
on a whim. But I know the US pretty well,
and if I'm heading up a country that's already been

(48:48):
invaded by US and realizes they're about to be the
big enemy, I'm going to try to build my own nuke.
You know, of course I would do the same thing.
Who wouldn't, right, No, I mean, likeeah.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Like geopolitics is inherently immoral. You can't bring ethics and
morals into geopolitics, and especially when it comes to you know,
once that the box has been open and nukes exists,
it's kind of a vacation of your moral obligation. I
guess you could put to like, defend your country if
you don't take one.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, and it is I think like we can look
at this new like these nuclear programs as like Schrodinger's
greatest crime against humanity, where like right, one could argue
the fact that the US and the Soviet Union builds
so many of these things stops a more devastating war
from occurring, but also at any moment today they could
end everybody's life, So we really don't know how this

(49:43):
is going to shake out in the long run.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
It's one of the biggest motherfuckers of the ultimate defense
against the nuclear bombs and another nuclear bombs. So you're kind
of you either allow yourself to become a plausible victim
of said bombing or build your own doomsday device and
threaten not with like self defense are like, if you fuck.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
With me, I will set the atmosphere on friar. If
we have a big enough fight, everybody dies. Yeah, MESSI situation. Now,
Barria did, or Stalin did, consider handing the job of Nuksar,
which is a thing people will call Barria and is
a pretty cool jobs side.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
That's a sick name. That's my new sky band name.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Yeah, Nuksar, Right. He considers handing the job initially to
the actual scientist Kapitska, but Stalin decides that someone that
famous is a bad pick, so he picks a lab
director named Kirchatov in general management of the program was
initially Molotov's duty before Barria gets that job, but Molotov
is bad at this, because he's bad at a lot

(50:44):
of things. Kirshatov had direct contact with Barria because Barria
is sending him all this info for on spies, and
near the end of forty four Kirchhatov starts pushing to
get Barry of the job. One of his colleagues later said, now,
of course every one knows that he Baria was bloody hangman.
But at that time Kirtchatov turned to a member of
the polit Bureau, a man with great authority who had

(51:05):
influence over Stalin. Right, this guy sucked, but he was
maybe the best dude for the job. So that's who
I wanted to have it. Right now, Barry is not
actually in the polar Bureau until forty six, but you'd
get the idea. These guys wanted to make a bomb,
and they know that Barry is probably going to be
competent at running the program. Amy and Night writes about
how the project actually got underway. Much of the construction

(51:27):
of building an installation was done by the NKVD. Since
nineteen forty six, MVD prisoners, as was the mining of
uranium and radium. Prisoners were also used for atomic energy research.
Fifty percent of which was done in special NKVD centers
called sharashi, such as those described in Solnitzen's The First Circle,
where highly trained specialists worked in captivity. The atom bomb

(51:49):
project ironically shows a gentler side to Barria. It's perhaps
closer to the kind of manager that he would have
been if he'd been born later and gotten a corporate
job right when he couldn't or anyone who pissed him off. Right, Yeah,
if he's just like a middle manager at like Sears.
This is because he can't just kill these guys, right,
they're world class physicists, and there's not an innumerable number

(52:13):
of those dudes.

Speaker 2 (52:13):
Right, He can't doll them through violence and.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
Thrights, right, And he doesn't want to torture them because
that might make them not good at doing the job anymore,
because torture is generally bad for you being a scientist.
Kapitzka is well aware of this, and he does not
get along with Barria, complaining to Stalin that the man
wasn't even a scientist and didn't understand physics. Barrier retorted
that Kapitzka didn't understand people, and they may have both

(52:38):
been kind of right in this regardless, Kapizza starts asking
Stalin to remove him from the project. Stalin shows Barrier
this letter, and Barria invites Kapizza to come over to
his house for a talk. Knowing Barria, that usually means
he's going to kill you. That's right, that's not a
good letter. Yeah, that's not a good letter. But that's
not at all what happens because he can't really get

(52:59):
rid of this guy. And I'm going to quote from
Knight's book here. Barria, who apparently wanted to make amends,
then went himself to see Kapizza, bringing with him a
magnificent present, a double barreled to the rifle. He gives
him a gun to try to get him to build
a bob. It's just such a different barrier than you
get the rest of this story because he has to

(53:21):
kind of turn the oil on a little bit.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
There's something like even more evil about this because it
tells you this whole time, he didn't have to be
the way that he was. No, they didn't have to
be a violent psycho. He enjoyed it because he could,
you know, influence people to get what to do what
he wanted them to do by being you know, a
middle management people person and instead he's like, I'm going

(53:47):
to beat him to death until their eyes popound instead.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
Yeah, yeah, there's a future where Barrier just gives everybody
a gives tens of thousands of people guns instead of
murdering them. Rented Baria chairman, Right, Yes, he just ghosts
the NRA route on this. Speaking of the NRA, that's
the only supporter of this podcast. Ah, we're back. I'm

(54:18):
feeling good, having a happy day, having a good time.
Never want to stop at all, So let's get back
to it. Perhaps thanks to Fuchs' example, Barria did not
trust the scientists that he and the whole USSR relied
on to build their atom bomb. You know, he's the
spy guy. Not surprising why his NKVD provided strict security.

(54:41):
And while the best scientists may not have been murderable,
they were open to other kinds of punishments. Right. You
get wildly different accounts of Barria as a manager, and
I think based on the amount of coercion he had
to employ for each person. One of Kerschatov's colleagues later
claimed Barria was a terrifying man, vile. We all knew this.
Our very lives dependent on him, but Russian physicist Juli

(55:04):
Caraton had a different take. Barry A quickly hardened all
work on the project with necessary scope and dynamism. This man,
who personified evil in the country's modern history, possessed at
the same time tremendous vigor and efficiency. It was impossible
not to admit his intellect, willpower and purposefulness. He was
a first class manager, able to bring every job to
his conclusion. And I can't tell you who's closer to right.

(55:26):
Perhaps it's just a matter of opinion based on what
your job was.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
I mean, honestly, from everything that we've heard, it sounds
like the second guy is probably true. Yeahake is probably
like he's an evil fucker, but like every single job
he's been put in charge of, with the exception of
weaseling his way into military operations, he's incredibly good at
He has like imcompicable attention to detail because he's a

(55:51):
fucking insane person. Right, he's a huge asshole, but he
does like this works well. The Soviets get their bomb
pretty fucking quick, you know. Barria also helps head up
the recruitment of former Nazi scientists for atomic research, which
is the thing that the Soviets do with almost as
much gusto as the United States. Now, one thing I

(56:12):
will give the Soviet Union initially is that, unlike in
the US, they're Nazi scientists are basically put in prison
at first, and every activity is carefully monitored and their
liberty is curtailed because they're Nazis, right right. Barria actually
changes this because he goes to visit the factory basically
where these guys are working, and he's like, well, you're

(56:33):
not meeting any of your timetables, what's wrong And they're like, well,
we're in prison and that's not very fun. And so
he actually reforms the conditions for these German scientists and
like makes their lives a lot nicer. Yeah, memory serves me. Well,
the Soviets actually tooken more Nazi scientists.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
Yeah, yeah, Barria is responsible for them treating them a
lot better, you know, which from a managerial standpoint is
a good idea. From a moral standpoint, not great.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
Yeah, but again the historia written all over it, like
with very verfitt Sears middle manager, Like we've like we've
discussed he's an incredibly efficient bastard, one of the most
efficient honestly.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Yeah, yeah, very efficient and like for again, obviously the
right decision from a making a nuke faster point of view.
Right Barria is present both through the start of the
first Soviet atomic reactor on December twenty fifth, nineteen forty six,
and the detonation of their first Adam BAM on August
twenty ninth, nineteen forty nine. There is a fun coda

(57:36):
to that story. After the successful blast, he kissed Kershatov
and said, in essence, thank god this worked. I would
have had to kill somebody otherwise. But after that, God forbid,
I'll have to go back to the old me. Yeah,
I know what. I have to go back to the
old May. But then after this moment of elation, he
starts to panic again because he's like, oh my god,

(57:57):
what if this doesn't look didn't look like the American blast?
Is my mushroom cloud normal? Do I have? Did I
have a good mushroom cloud? Daddy? And he has to
call one of his spies who'd been at the Los
Alamos tests to like confirm that their nuke blast was normal. Like,
it's beautiful, Barrier, You've got a really good.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Mushroom Cloudroom cloud measuring competition nobody mushroom cloud that that
they got to experience a few years before your mushrooms cloud.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
Stalin's gonna love it, man, He's gonna really like it.
Don't feel bad. It's what's more important is with not
like see And I talk about this a lot, cho
I think it's really my primary moral issue with the
Oppenheimer movie is that it provides this, like really unrealistic
expectation for how a mushroom cloud should look. And I
think a lot of secret policemen and dictators out there

(58:49):
working on their own nukes are gonna feel like my
nuke isn't good enough if it doesn't look like the
Oppenheimer nuke. And that's just it's it's fucked up. You know.
It's the same as having Channing Tatum's beautiful ass out
on display for everybody to look at. It's such an
unreasonable standard, you know, fair all nukes are beautiful.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
They're keeping they're keeping all of us with you know,
normal sized mushroom clouds, very making us very self conscious
about the horrific devastation that our mushroom I don't want
to know.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
What movie you're thinking of with Channing Tatum. That's what
I imagine, I know, I just wanted to make sure
that your your reference was in fact from like ten
years ago, like it usually. I just want to say,
because I know Kim Jong un listens to this podcast
a lot, your nukes are valid, Your your world ending

(59:40):
hell weapons are beautiful, and I see you, Kim John.
You know, I just wanted to know. I just wanted
to know that. And I feel the same to the British.
Whatever fucking ship they call a nuke, right, it's good enough, guys,
it's good enough.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
Smoke cloud and beans, it's a fucking ship, buddy.

Speaker 1 (59:59):
Sandwich yeah they call those, and and potato chips sandwiches. Yeah,
they've got one of those loaded onto a sub. Why
not right at the point at which they use them.
It doesn't matter. So anyway, Barrya eventually gets convinced that
his nuke is good enough, and he calls Stalin. This
is like the chief moment of it. He's so excited

(01:00:21):
to get to tell's boss we've got a nuke now,
and all Stalin says is I've heard and then hangs up.
Can just Stalin move? He can't like praise him too much? No, absolutely,
you gotta be really careful in this moment, right, and
Barrya gets furious and he threatens the operator on the
phone line and he's like, you have put a spoke

(01:00:42):
in my wheel, Trader, I'll grind you to a pulp.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
It's like, oh, my name is Steve. Name you named
the telephone operator sitting right next to you.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
If you have complaints. So this was possibly the fact
that stal And responds this way evidence of his growing
dissatisfaction and distrust in Baria, right, which is heightened by
the fact that in these post war years, Stalin is
deteriorating rapidly. He had always been paranoid. World War two
ages him not hard to see why right, and in fact,

(01:01:17):
a famous neurologist. Stalin had been having issues for a while.
In nineteen twenty seven, a famous Russian neurologist had diagnosed
him with a paranoia, and Stalin had had the man poisoned.
In nineteen thirty seven, another one of his doctors had
written of Stalin he was headstrong, consistent, and had extraordinary
willpower and nerves of iron, excellent memory. He suffered mainly

(01:01:40):
from two pathological states, megalomania and a persecution complex. Stalin
had this guy shot.

Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
So there's also like, you know, most of the best
doctors in the Soviet Union got taken out during the
Doctor's plot.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Right, well that, yeah, that's coming up. But even before that,
Stalin is having guys purged from saying like, hey man,
maybe take some CBD homie, you know, like chill out
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
After like the sixth or seventh doctor to get whacked
for like giving some a diagnosis you have, You're you're
the eighth doctor that has to go in like nah
do it is jacked, yoke, dick down. He is the
pinnacle of Russian man twelve pack. My god, I've never
seen so many abs. I've never I've never seen a
man have abs on his legs before. And you know what,

(01:02:25):
even though he's not Russian, he's Georgian. He is the
pinnacle of Russian manliness. Nothing wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Absolutely, your knees are actually additional abs. It's remarkable. I've
never seen anything like it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
I've never seen a dick do a push up before.
It was incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:02:41):
So there's probably not much that medically could have been
done about the fact that Stalin is increasingly unhinged, and
it starts to have especially in the kind of this
late period, a series of strokes that are steadily degrading
his capacity to function. We don't know precisely what's going on, right,
we can intuit some from the actual medical reports we

(01:03:01):
have and just some from his symptoms that this is
like he's stroking out and he is gradually losing his
ability to like function as a result of that. And
I found a paper on Stalin's last years for the
European Journal of Neurology which summarizes the Boss's state in
the late forties and early fifties quite well. Quote. After
the war, Stalin's natural suspiciousness and fears reached new heights.

(01:03:25):
He admitted to Marshall Georgie Zukov, the commander in chief
of the Soviet Armies, to living in fear of his
own shadow. Silence terrified him. At a Politburea dinner, he
noticed Andre's Danoff sitting silently. Stalin exploded, look at him,
sitting there like christ is if nothing was of concern
to him. Z Danoff paled with fear. Stalin also complained
about Ladislav Gomulka, secretary of the Polish Communist Party. He

(01:03:48):
sits there all the time, looking into my eyes as
though we were reaching for something. And why does he
bring a note pad and pencil with him? Why does
he write down every word? I say, he's just losing
his mind. And you know he was.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Starting to stroke out when he started just demanding people
put their own tomatoes in the pockets and then surprised
because he couldn't do it anymore. Yeah, he doesn't have
the dexterity. In nineteen fifty one, in front of Politburo
members Anastas mccoya and Nikita Krushchyev, whom he did not
appear to notice, Stalin exclaimed, I'm finished. I trust no one,

(01:04:20):
not even myself. One of the more lucid things he
says in this period. He probably shouldn't have. The last
person on earth I would trust if I was just
s was also Joseph Stalin.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Look, he wasn't wrong all the time. Yeah. So Stalin
had demoted Barry, making him resign his post running the
NKVD in nineteen forty six, but this was not really
a big deal. Barry had retained most of his influence,
at least for a while. He's still running this critical
bomb project and like it's actually kind of a reasonable thing.
To do objectively. Building a nuke is a big job.

(01:04:54):
You probably both of these, you might not do them
as well, right, Yeah, you know, we probably need someone
else to handle that kind of stuff. You know, I
made sure when cool Zone started its nuclear weapons program.
I made sure that we took other stuff off of
Daniel's plate, you know, just because I want him to.
I want him to get that bomb ready for us.
It's the only way we're going to win against the
pod save guys. What Sophie, We've tried peace with them.

(01:05:19):
It's simply not an option anymore. I mean, this is
this is also why I have attached listening devices to
all of your animals, so I could then steal your
nuclear weapons form my podcast. That's right, that's right. You're
really and soon we'll have mutually assured destruction, which is
going to take us both to a new level in podcasting.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
It's the only thing that we could possibly do.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Yeah, it's it's the logical next step. I should have
accept our accept our offer for peace. I feel like
we were really fair. Yeah, we were really fair. All
we wanted was to deport them to the East City
where they all live. Anyway I could do Kazakhstan, you know,

(01:06:01):
so international observers at the time kind of noted that,
like it's this could have being taken out of directly
leading the NKBD actually might have worked out for Baria
in the long term. There was a way in which
this could have been a real win for him, because, like,
it's dangerous being the secret Police head. Stalin is going
to die, and when he does, if you're running the

(01:06:21):
secret Police historically, there's a good chance you're going to
get purged, right because you're we've already covered this wave
a few times, right, you have so many purges, you
purge the purger. Right, This could have, This might have,
and it kind of almost does put Barria in a
natural position to be Stalin's successor, which seems to be
what Barria wanted, right, But the fact that he is

(01:06:44):
kind of obviously positioned as one of the potential successors
also puts him in the crosshairs of an increasingly irrational
and paranoid Joseph Stalin. Now, as you talked about a
little earlier, Stalin doesn't like his doctors, right, and Barria,
he's having Barya arrest growing numbers of them. In this
period of time, and as he's again he's convinced. This

(01:07:06):
is also married to Stalin's anti Semitism, which gets really
unhinged in the fifties, in the early fifties, right, like,
he is kind of going off the rails. Some people
will say he might have done his version of the
Holocaust had he stayed alive long enough. That's really improvable
in any way, shape or form. But it's not impossible,
right knowing the guy, he certainly is a lot. Part

(01:07:28):
of why he's having a lot of these doctors arrested
and even killed is because they're Jewish and he doesn't
trust them. Right of course, so mel Gibson's been training
his whole life for this role right right, again, he
would be a good bick for Stalin now because he
distrusts his doctors and has had barrier arresting so many
of these guys. Stalin starts taking health advice from a

(01:07:48):
less than trustworthy source, primarily one of his bodyguards who
had previously been trained as a veterinarian.

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
Oh fuck yeah, we're getting like the Soviet version.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
Yeah, I love this guy, this fucking vet. He's coming
in like, well, I know how to fucking remove a
ship from a horse's impacted colon. Yeah, I can probably
handle your hypertension. And the treatment he gives Stalin for
hypertension is boiled water with iodine. I don't think that's
what you want to do for your hypertension. You must

(01:08:21):
put the jade egg up your This is by the way,
there's a new show on the Regimes. I think it's
really solid. I think it's mostly there's a little Stalin.
It's mostly seems to be based on Chowchescu. Yeah, but
you get a little Hitler, you get a little Stalin,

(01:08:44):
get you get a little bit of Trump obviously in
there too. It's good though. It's actually like really I
think pretty smart. And the the the obviously Kate Winslet
is really good. And also the the male lead I
think is is very good. I didn't like him in
the first episode, but I've liked him a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
I just binge watch the whole thing yesterday.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
I'm still just like three episodes in, but I'm a
big fan so far. Anyway. I say this because it's
kind of covering a dictator in the same sort of
period that Stalin is in, right when they're starting to
lose their mind and fall for all this bullshit health stuff.
Right in nineteen forty eight, Stalin has Molotov's wife, who
is Jewish, arrested for treason. That same year he demotes Barria.

(01:09:24):
And this is really what hits Barria. Right, The nineteen
forty six one generally seen as like not actually a
loss for Baria. He actually starts to carve away a
lot of his power. After forty eight, he is convinced
of a obviously of a Jewish conspiracy that involves a
lot of these doctors in Moscow, and he has his
security services take action against them. And I'm going to

(01:09:44):
quote from an article by Mark Safranski published by ASU's
Center for Strategic Communication. Most of the unfortunate doctors who
were arrested by the KGB and lavishly tortured had conspicuously
Jewish names. They were accused of planning to kill Comrad
Stalin and having killed and this was all too reminiscent
of the Kirov case that launched the Great Terror. And

(01:10:04):
again because like Zdanov dies, there's this, you know, belief
that he had been killed by this like Jewish plot.
That's part of the evidence that people say that, like
if Stalin had lived longer, things could have gotten real
fucking ugly, right because this is this mirrors the situation
that leads us to the Great Terror right now, the
Doctor's plot in this kind of obsession with anti you know,

(01:10:26):
this Jewish conspiracy that Stalin believes. This is not the
only paranoid fantasy panic that he has in his ailing years,
and the one that's going to hit Barry of the
hardest is the Mingrellian affair. Now this hasn't been a
big part of the story because Barria doesn't identify super
strongly as a Mingrelian nationalist, right, but we talked about this.
This is that like kind of ethnic minority within Georgia

(01:10:48):
that Berry is a part of. Right around the kind
of last period of his life, Stalin cooks up this
theory about a Mingrelian nationalist ring that is urging a
separate ethno state with the backing of quote Western imperialists, which,
like obviously the US has plenty of plots to try
to take out the Soviet Union during this period. I

(01:11:09):
don't think this is one of them. I've never come
into any evidence that we're trying to establish a Mingrelian
state in.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
Georgia, as they say as mcgrellia goes, so goes the
Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
Yeah. I think if you had brought this up to
any of the guys running the US, they would have
been like, ming, what now, ming the merciless? But is
that in Mongolia or something? What are you talking about? Yeah,
what are you talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
Saying it's in Georgia. There's a there's a Ingrellian grill
in Atlanta that let's go, oh.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
Shit, yeah, let's take a ride. So Stalin launches a
brutal purge of the Georgian Communist Party, targeting Mingrelian members
to be arrested and shot. And because these guys are
Mingrelian and Barry is the kind of guy he is,
a lot of these are his proteges, right like Stalin
is kind of and I don't know that Stalin really
believes this is happening. I think it's likelier he is

(01:11:57):
trying to get rid of Barry's support and this is
a convenient way to do that. Right now. If you
know Laventi, again, his identity isn't huge to him, but
this really like does damage again to kind of like
a lot of the people that he's going to rely on.
Once Stalin is out to help him take power. On

(01:12:18):
the night of February twenty eighth, nineteen fifty three, Stalin
holds his normal dinner party at his datcha. As usual,
it lasted until almost dawn. While Stalin is usually not
a heavy drinker, he's kind of hell. Have a little
bit of watered down wine, he'll water down some vodka,
you know, and he'll get kind of buzz. He's usually
pretty buzzed. He doesn't get hammered. He likes everyone else

(01:12:38):
to get hammered because then he's in control, right, because
he's Stalin, you know. But this night it's noted at
least and again everyone who was there, none of them
are reliable narrators. But also medically, it makes sense that
this would have happened. The people who were there say
he got fucking hammered tonight that night, right, And that
would have because he is a guy with untreated hypertension,

(01:13:00):
and getting drunk when you have untreated hypertension will raise
your blood pressure, right, I mean, getting drunk raises your
blood pressure, and if you have untreated hypertension, that can
cause a stroke, which is what happens. Probably Stalin has
a stroke and a fatal intracranial hemorrhage. This is essentially
where the movie The Death of Stalin begins, right. I'm
gonna guess a lot of people have seen that, And

(01:13:21):
again the specifics, it doesn't really get a lot of them, right,
But I think if you watch the movie, the broad
strokes of it are close enough for like what most
people would actually need to know about how this functioned. Right. Barria,
as is depicted in the movie, like everyone else, probably
thrilled to see his boss struck down because he had
very clearly been on this on the chopping block, right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
Yeah, he was on his way out one horrible way.
It's not like Brian's going to get retired to his
dacha or something. He was getting He was giving the
millimeter based pension plan right right, right now.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
There was probably would have been a Macarov right nine
by eighteen by the time period, as my guess. So
there's no obvious successor, and Stalin's inner circle jockeyed for
position around him. Khrushchev and Barria are the most capable
plotters of the group, and the two initially work together
to push out Malankov, but then Krushchev turns around and

(01:14:17):
allies with Malankov against Baria. Right, we don't need to
rehash the whole thing, but there's this kind of interregnum
period of a few months after Stalin's death. Right, the
movie condenses it to a much shorter period of time,
but there's a bit of space there, right, And these
are busy months, right, Barry is first thing he's going
to do is carry out this series of mass releases

(01:14:38):
from prison, right, of all these guys he had had
locked up, right, and he pushes a slurry of reforms
as well. Shila Fitzpatrick actually credits him primarily with the
early reforms that follow Stalin's death, writing, within six weeks
as head of the Security Police, he had released the
Jewish doctors, investigated Nkole's death and informed the team of

(01:14:58):
Stalin's involvement, forbidden the use of torture and interrogations, transferred
much of the MVDS, that's the NKVDS industrial empire to
civilian ministries, and set in motion the release of more
than a million prisoners from the gulags.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
I mean this has to be just saving face at
the last minute, right, Well, yes, yes, this is not.
None of these guys, all of these guys, anyone who
has lived in Stalin's inner circle this long, you don't
do things for reasons other than survival, right of course not.
You know, you wouldn't have lived that long if you
were that kind of fella, you know. So again I
don't credit this with him doing it out of the

(01:15:33):
goodness of his heart, but it does show like where
his mind is of like what I need to do
to position myself, which is I need to be the
guy who's pushing all of these.

Speaker 1 (01:15:41):
Reforms as fast and hard as I possibly can. Now.
He also cleans house at the MVD, which is again
the successor to you know, it's the NKVD, and he
replaces these guys who had been kind of put in
to erode his power base with some of his own
people who were still remaining. Right. Khrushchev and the other
inner members know Barry is dangerous, and they've known him

(01:16:03):
long enough that he is not the guy they want
holding their lives in his hands.

Speaker 2 (01:16:08):
I think it takes over. I imagine that they all
know that they're they're getting the millimeter pension as.

Speaker 1 (01:16:13):
Well, right right, that's there. All their assumption is that,
like he's going to do another great purge once she's
in power, and we're all fucked if we don't. Has
no choice. They know too much about him, right, right,
and it is it is interesting. We'll talk about this
a little bit at the end, but let me get
through the rest of this first. So the plot to
unseat Barria is delayed for a bit by a rebellion
in East Germany that they have to crack down on,

(01:16:34):
but once that calms down after June nineteen fifty three,
plans continue anew. And this is where Zukov comes back
into it. It's Zukov and one of his men, General
Kiril Moskalenko. Since Barry has got this iron grip on
the police, right, the military is the only group of
guys with guns who you can trust to take him down.
So the plotters, you know, again, this is kind of

(01:16:55):
organized around Krushchev and Malenkov, gather ten officers to their
banner and in a June twenty sixth meeting at the
Presidium ambush Barria at the start of what is supposed
to be a polit bureau meeting. Here's how writer Cheryl
Roefer describes what happens next. Barria, as usual, arrived just
before the meeting was to start, Malankov changed the agenda

(01:17:16):
to focus specifically on Barria's activities. This was a complete
surprise to Barria. Malankov laid out Barria's misdeeds and alleged
that Barria had been seeking to displace the collective leadership
into foment discord among Prosidium members. He then proposed a
number of possible remedies, all of which included removing Barria
from the posts he held. He invited the other members
of the Prosidium to join and enumerating Barria's mistakes, which

(01:17:37):
they did. This put them on record as supporting Barria's removal.
As Malenkov summed up the accusations, he pressed the button
to alert the military, who marched into the room. He
then declared that Barria is so cunning and so dangerous
that only the devil knows what he might do now.
I therefore proposed that we arrest him immediately. Moscolenko brought
out their guns and arrested and searched Barria. So again

(01:17:58):
one of the big differences, it's not Zukov who's there
with all the guns showing up in the room to like,
it's it's this other guys, who's you know, working with
with Zukov. I think probably just because Zukov doesn't know
that it's going to work, and it's a little bit
too canny a survivor, and I want to put his
own neck off right right there, I know which one
I like.

Speaker 2 (01:18:16):
The envision is Oscar Isaac storming in there with with
an ak.

Speaker 1 (01:18:20):
It's much better in the movie, right. And everyone's great
in that movie. I mean he he is having such
a good time, right. I would never have fucking called
oh god, what's his name? The guy who plays krush Chef. Yeah,
I would never have called Steve Buscemi as krush Chef,
but he is an excellent khrush chef. Oh it's crazy,

(01:18:41):
really Yeah. And the guy that got from Olotav I
don't even know what his name is, but he was
really good to everybody's great in that movie. Barry is
not killed on the spot as he is in the movie,
but he's arrested and tried on December tenth. He is
executed on December twenty third. Now, the common view, and
the one put forward in Death of Stalin was that
he was the most frightening and evil of the polit

(01:19:01):
Bureau members right, and even his fellow members felt that
they had to take action against him. There's a strong
argument to be made that the main thing they feared
from Barria was that he was a reformer. And this
gets inted again some unprovable stuff, But you have to
remember Barry is a guy who believes primarily in his
own power. He is not ideologically committed to Communism like

(01:19:23):
a lot of these other guys are. He certainly not
nearly as much as a guy like Molotov was right,
and he has opened for a lot more reform than
other members of the polit Bureau. And this is the
argument that Amy Knight makes quote. The changes he advocated
were so bold and far reaching that, while greeted with
relief by the public, they alarmed his colleagues. Ironically, it
was Khrushchev, acclaimed later as a courageous de Stalinizer, who

(01:19:45):
was chiefly responsible for putting a halt to Barry's reforms
by leading the plot against him. As this biography suggests,
Barria's program aimed at undermining the Stalinist's system and therefore
might have led to its demise. Khrushchev's policies, while reformist
in fact perpetuated Stalinist so Khrushchev eliminated the role of
police terror, many would argue the system remained essentially totalitarian,

(01:20:05):
and obviously that's a deeply debatable point. I'm not a historian,
but I just wanted to note that there is, you know,
that is an argument people will make. I think you
could very easily make the argument that it would have
been a lot worse if Barria had wound up in
charge of the USSR too.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
I think both things can, Like, like we've said multiple times,
both things can one percent be true, because there's a
very good chance that there could have been reforms. But
I think as great as that chance was, that the
chance was much greater that you have experienced some form
of great purge first.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Right, Right, I think that's a solid point. Now. One
thing that I will kind of note here that is
interesting is that after they get rid of Barria, there's
more purging among the politbureau. Right, Khrushchev is going to
do his version of cleaning house, but they stop killing
each other. Right. It's almost as if there's this kind

(01:20:56):
of attitude after Barry has gone that like anybody who's
lived up to this point, I may have to get
them out of power. I may have to like, you know,
push him into a country house or something. But like,
I don't want to kill any of these guys, Like
we're all the only ones who made it. I don't
want to like murder these other guys anymore. Let's stop
and they do, right, Khrushchev doesn't massacre all of his

(01:21:19):
you know, former polit bureau colleagues. And when Khrushchev gets
forced out, he's allowed to live, you.

Speaker 2 (01:21:24):
Know, right, right, I wonder honestly, I'm just just curious
if Barry would have taken the same turn, because maybe
maybe he would have seen the point of all the matters,
because again, he's a practical, efficient person, right right, Unfortunately, Yeah,
practicality and efficiency devoid of humanity equals just the banality

(01:21:44):
of pure terror and evil, which is what he was.
So like, it's it's curious to wonder if he's like, oh,
we don't really need to do that anymore. So I
don't really I don't really care. That's the same thing
of what he was doing in his own personal time.
But right right, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
Yeah, it will never know. I think it is possible
that like he's more or less, he's not all that
different from Krushchev in terms of like kind of ratcheting
down the massacres and stuff. Maybe no way to know.
That's certainly not the argument that Night makes.

Speaker 2 (01:22:12):
He seems like, to me is a guy that saw
violence as just a means to an end. There was
no personality or like we said, there's no ideology attached
to it. He's like, well, you know, killing people is
the most the quickest way to complete my goal, and
until it isn't you know, it's not the most sufficient
way to do it anymore, so I don't need to

(01:22:34):
do it anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:22:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, possibly anyway, Joe, that is the Laventi
Barriers story. Hopefully this is helpful. You know, when you
become the secret police chief of a country governing roughly
one fifth of the world's land mass.

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
We all have to have dreams. I'm glad that I
now have some research material.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):
Yeah yeah, hopefully I'll get that other half or one
fifth of the world's land mass. We can really start
making some nukes. I mean, we can make some form
of pact non aggression less right right, those always end. Well, anyway,
I'm gonna go hang out with my friend who's helping
me organize this plan. He's really quiet but very organized.
I think things are going to go great with him.

(01:23:17):
Seems like a good guy to have in this situation.
Where's tiny glasses, Georgia, We're real, smallest glasses you've ever
seen in your life. Anyway, We're done. Goodbye, Well, actually
not goodbye, Joe, you got any pluggables to plug? I'm
the host of the Lines of by Donkeys podcast. We

(01:23:38):
talked about military history, disasters, horrible things and kind of
similar to this, and we've talked about a lot of
topics that are vaguely connected to Baria and the Soviet
Union during World War Two, like the Battle of Curse,
the Battle of Stalingrad, the Winter War, things like that.
I also write military science fiction, and you can find
my newest series, The Undying Legion wherever it is you

(01:24:01):
cop your books at h Yeah, check that stuff out.
And uh, you know, I don't know. Don't deport people
if you can avoid it. Behind the Bastards is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,

(01:24:24):
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts,