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