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