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

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

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 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.

in Stalin's inner circle, almost everybody. We'll talk about malatav 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 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 of things he might have done.

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 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, 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 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 of the crew, right.

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 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 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 that'll buff out. It's a little buff out of Berlin.

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. You think this guy shouldn't have propaganda me. I don't know.

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.

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 to bury you. That's a hard position to be in. You know, there's no inforgen.

It is kind of a masterclass and ass covering. But part of protecting his own ass was that Barria had 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 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 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 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.

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 of these engagements in terms of like captured, right primarily.

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, 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

do a World War two together? And Stalin he kind 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, but starring the main two characters from the Lethal Weapon franchise.

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. 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. 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 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 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, 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,

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 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, 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.

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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 know how bad things are right now, it's October of forty one.

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, 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.

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.

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 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

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

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, 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. That's made just.

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 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 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,

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

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 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 on their own. Not really the same.

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.

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, 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 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 not have been able to do the things that we were doing if we were like fighting the Nazis and the Sandias, you know, probably would have been a little harder to establish that facility. Oppenheimer would have been a different movie, as much nudity, but differently shot. You know,

still would watch it, still would watch it. So to help make up for this gap that's caused by the fact that they're fighting this war, 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

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 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,

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.

At this point, I forget. I always mix up my spy agencies again, they go through a bunch of them at this point, right, But he's handing Soviet spies classified information about British nuclear ambitions right, kind of through the

whole war period. And he's really good at this, right, He's good enough at this that not only does no one notice that he's spying on the British nuclear weapons program for the Soviet Union, but he gets transferred to Los Alamos to help the Americans with their much cooler 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. 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 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 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 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. I don't know how likely that is, but it's possible, And when it comes to the morality of doing this, it's kind of something I can't really fault them for, right,

Like I don't like nukes. I think it's bad that either Trump or Putin right now could end all civilization on a whim. But I know the US pretty well, and if I'm heading up a country that's already been invaded by US and realizes they're about to be the big enemy, I'm 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.

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 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 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 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 of those dudes.

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 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 kind of turn the oil on a little bit.

on to build their atom bomb. You know, he's the spy guy. Not surprising why his NKVD provided strict security. And while the best scientists may not have been murderable, they were open to other kinds of punishments. Right. You get wildly different accounts of 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 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.

Perhaps it's just a matter of opinion based on what your job was.

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 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 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.

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, 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.

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.

Whatever fucking ship they call a nuke, right, it's good enough, guys, it's good enough.

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 in my wheel, Trader, I'll grind you to a pulp.

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 from two pathological states, megalomania and a persecution complex. Stalin had this guy shot.

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. 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 less than trustworthy source, primarily one of his bodyguards who had previously been trained as a veterinarian.

It's mostly seems to be based on Chowchescu. Yeah, but you get a little Hitler, you get a little Stalin, 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.

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 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 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, 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

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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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.

were that kind of fella, you know. So again I don't credit this with him doing it out of the goodness of his heart, but it does show like where his mind is of like what I need to do to position myself, which is I need to be the guy who's pushing all of these.

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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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.

push him into a country house or something. But like, I don't want to kill any of these guys, Like we're all the only ones who made it. I don't want to like murder these other guys anymore. Let's stop and they do, right, Khrushchev doesn't massacre all of his you know, former polit bureau colleagues. And when Khrushchev gets forced out, he's allowed to live, you.

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.

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