Giles Milton - Churchill’s Unholy Alliance and Why It Changed Everything

Hello and welcome to the Winston Marshall Show with me, Winston Marshall. I sat down with the British historian, Giles Milton, to explore his latest book, The Stalin Affair, the story of...

Joseph Stalin and his relationship with Churchill, Roosevelt, and the West in their quest to defeat Nazism and Hitler. But in that quest, did the Western allies align themselves with a devil we looked at the character of stalin we looked at the various meetings between stalin and churchill and those western leaders all of this and much more before you

hear from giles i wanted to say thank you thank you for your continued support remember to press follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcast from and if you head over to winston marshall You'll enjoy an extended conversation where Giles and I discuss another one of his books that are called White Gold, the history of white European slaves in Africa under the...

barbary pirates the muslim corsairs this is a long forgotten history and we look at how over a million white slaves were taken and captured from across europe and even the british isles even beyond that. That's all at winstonmarshall.co.uk. But without further ado, Giles Milton. Well, it is my great pleasure to have one of my favourite historians in the studio today, Giles Milton. My favourite because you...

choose all the topics that I seem to love. I first came across your work through White Gold, we were discussing this before we started rolling, about the European slave trade in North Africa, the over a million white slaves, which we're going to hopefully cover on another episode.

But what we're going to get into today is your most recent book, The Stalin Affair, the impossible alliance that won the war. Now, why I thought this... would be interesting and why I wanted to cover it with you is because one of the themes we've been exploring on the show is the post-World War II consensus. Part of that was a weird relationship that the West has with communism, even with Stalin. And it's perfectly normal, I think.

In London, you can wear a Che Guevara t-shirt. You can even fly a hammer and sickle. And I've seen them quite regularly at various marches. And people don't really bat an eyelid. Obviously, for good reason, can't fly a swastika around. And part of that, I think, comes down to this alliance we had with Stalin. And this is what your book explores. So I wondered maybe if we go to that alliance. I think we have to go to 1941.

when Hitler breaks his pact with Stalin, invades Russia. I mean, perhaps we should start very briefly in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin, the two great dictators of Europe... they astonish the world by signing their Nazi-Soviet pact. And this brings them into the same sphere, political sphere. And this is of momentous importance, because this means that Hitler can invade the west of Poland, which he does.

1939. And Stalin can invade the east of Poland. And this, of course, brings Great Britain into the Second World War. So a lot of people watching on the sidelines thought this alliance is never going to last between Hitler and Stalin. And sure enough, in 1941, 22nd of June 1941, Hitler's Wehrmacht, which has been massed on the frontier of the Soviet Union, 2 million troops, greatest invasion in history, they pour over the Soviet frontier and effectively the Nazi-Soviet pact has come to an end.

And suddenly, we in Great Britain find ourselves bizarrely on the same side as Joseph Stalin, because we're all fighting against Hitler. And this is really the beginnings of this very, very strange alliance. Okay. And it's not a given. that Stalin would have made that pact with Hitler back in 1939. I've just been reading Churchill's history of the World War II. And it seemed that in that the Molotov-Rubentrop pact, actually...

There was a little bit of umming and ahhing about will there be a deal done actually with the Russians, with the British. It wasn't. sure that they would do that deal with the Nazis then. Am I right? You're absolutely right. And in fact, I mean, the British and French were also trying to do deals with Stalin at the time. The British sent this

imposterous aristocrat. He had a quadruple-barrelled name to Moscow to try and negotiate this. And Stalin, when he met him, he turned to his commissars and he said, they can't be serious sending this guy. And so the British were... sent packing, the French were sent packing.

And the Germans remained. And von Ribbentrop, yeah, managed to do this deal, which worked. It was a deal. It was a pragmatic political deal. It enabled them to invade Poland, which is what they wanted to do. And it avoided a war. for two years between these two powers. Okay, so Churchill… was openly anti-communist, anti-socialist before this. And he's very vocal about it. I mean, yeah, it's worth really setting out his track record because this is going to be very important for what happens.

Churchill detested the Soviet Union, communism and Stalin and had done for his entire political career. Remember Churchill in 1919, at the end of the First World War, was Minister of Munitions, and it was Churchill who'd sent the British Army and British munitions. into Russia to try and stamp out this new revolutionary regime. Supporting the white Russians. Supporting the white Russians, exactly, doing that.

You know, he described them as a league of failures, the morbid, the deranged. I mean, the language he used was very, very churchy, very rich and very damning. So he had a real, you know, several decades of track record. of hating this regime. And, you know, it should be said that Stalin also hated the West and Stalin would have liked nothing better than to topple the democracies of the West. Do we know why Churchill hated them? Do we know where that...

How he understood it, was it because he was reading Marxist literature and understood it's evil? I think so, yeah. political background. I mean, everything in Churchill was against this system that was being set up in the Soviet Union. And he recognized it as an authoritarian inversion of, or sort of...

the other cheek of the same ass of Nazism. Yeah, I mean, he recognized it for what it was, which is a completely monstrous, authoritarian, hideous, murderous, you know, political system. Okay, so he's then in charge in 41 when... it suddenly finds it that the West and the Soviets have a common enemy, which is...

I shouldn't say the West. It was Britain alone at that point. Britain alone. Yeah. And there's a really fascinating thing happens. And it's worth focusing on that one day, 22nd of June, 1941, when Hitler invades the Soviet Union. Churchill is at Chequers. his country retreat, and he's with all his advisors. And they're sitting around the table. They're wondering what they're going to do. How are they going to react to this? They just don't know. And most of his advisors are saying,

you can't possibly go into a pact with Joseph Stalin. It's just absurd. It doesn't work. Look at what you've said over the last two decades. And Churchill, I think, this is a hallmark of Churchill's greatness, is that he had to take a very very brave political decision. He had to perform the greatest political U-turn of his career on that day. That very night, he broadcasts live on the BBC to the nation and says...

that he's going to throw his weight, his support, his political support and military support behind Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. And it's a fascinating broadcast because Churchill, he knows he can't, like... Most politicians bluff his way through this. He confronts to the nation. He said no one has been a more ardent critic of communism than I have, but we're in a state of absolute crisis.

And this is simply the most pragmatic option open to us. And he sells it to the nation like that. He was criticised by many people for doing so, but it was a monumental decision on his part because now… From that day on, we've got into bed, or he's got into bed, with his greatest political enemy. He recognised it was an alliance with the devil from the beginning. He did. But he also recognised it was to defeat the other devil.

I mean, he actually says pretty much words to this effect, which is, you know, they're both monsters, but one is a slightly worse monster than the other, and that's Hitler. Do we have any... idea about how he was it was just pragmatic for the for the moment was did he see communism or the soviet union is something on the horizon that would need to be defeated and dealt with

Yes, I think long term, he would have liked to eradicate the system in the Soviet system. But, you know, this is a moment of crisis. I mean, Britain's in... in serious trouble at this point. You know, it's being bombed from the air by the Luftwaffe. British cities are being reduced to dust. This is not a time for long-term reflection. No, it really is a case for them being desperate. And he's...

desperately on the phone to President Roosevelt saying, help us, we're sinking, we really need American aid. And for a long time, Roosevelt procrastinated. I guess, could Churchill have had... a different approach which is like i don't need to make an alliance with the communist we're just going to fight the nazis here what happens in the east isn't my business and we don't need to send them help because they

Am I right in understanding the British then send aid to the Russians? Yeah, massive, massive. I mean, more of it eventually will come from America, but Britain does as well. But I think, again, there's a pragmatic approach here that both Churchill and later Roosevelt see the advantage. of enormous numbers of Hitler's troops being killed by the Russians on the Eastern Front. This is going to help the war in Western Europe, you know, when eventually...

D-Day comes about, the liberation in 1944, this has been greatly aided by the fact that so many German troops have lost their lives in the Soviet Union. And so how much aid were we giving the Russians at that point? Because...

Churchill is constantly on the phone to Roosevelt and sending his letters. begging for more and more help. And yet we had enough to give to the Soviets. No, we didn't have very much to give at all at first. And this is one of Stalin's grouches. He said, well, it's all very well, you know, but you're not offering me anything. And ultimately, most of the stuff would come from America. But a critical event happens in the summer of 1941.

where Churchill sends Lord Beaverbrook, who was the nation's most powerful press baron at the time, who was the proprietor of the Daily Express, the world's biggest circulation newspaper at the time, he sends Lord Beaverbrook. And Avril Harriman, who was this multimillionaire American businessman who'd been appointed as Roosevelt's personal envoy to Winston Churchill. So Avril was based...

in England, and largely based in Chequers, working alongside Winston Churchill. These two men are sent to the Soviet Union because Churchill wants to know He doesn't know anything about Stalin, apart from the fact he's a mass murderer. And he wants to know about him. And he wants to know, more importantly, is Stalin serious about fighting this war against Hitler? Or is he going to throw in the towel a couple of months down the line?

I'd like to come back to those. You say that Churchill knew he was a mass murderer, but the Red Terror is later. It's in the 50s, after the war. And I know we know that the gulags exist and Lenin actually started them. But what do they actually know about Stalin being a mass murderer? Well, they know all about the famine in Ukraine, which killed millions of people. And that had been, yes, exactly. That had been reported on in the press.

so was widely known, and Stalin was widely held to blame for that, for knocking out the kulaks and the rich peasants, etc. So he was held responsible. In Churchill's eyes, he was responsible for the deaths of enormous numbers of people. Which was about six million, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the numbers are disputed, but it was a vast number. Right, okay. So back to then these two, this envoy that's sent.

And this might seem like a silly question, but how actually did they get across to Russia? Well, it was very, very difficult. They went by ship to Archangel and then flew from Archangel to Moscow. Where's Archangel? Okay, sorry, it's in the very... far north of Russia.

So they went across the... Up the North Sea. Exactly, into the Baltic, around there, and sort of up the top of Russia. An extraordinary voyage, very, very dangerous as well, with all the U-boats prowling around in the North Sea at the time. The only other way into... Especially as the Nazis had Norway.

Yes, exactly. No, it was extremely dangerous. The only other way, which is what Churchill would later use when he visits Stalin, which we'll, I'm sure, get onto later, he flew to Casablanca, he flew to, they flew across North Africa to Egypt, then from Cairo. he flew to Tehran, and from Tehran he flew over the Caucasus into Moscow. This is a journey that takes four or five days and is absolutely punishing in a plane of the period. Yeah, wow. So a dangerous voyage, a difficult one, but...

And actually, Beaverbrook and Avril Harriman, as they flew into Moscow, they were fired on by Soviet ground defences who thought they were German Luftwaffe planes coming to attack. But anyway, they landed safely. And it's worth sort of picturing the scene because these... are two multi-millionaires. They are dripping with money, and they are exactly the sort of people that Stalin absolutely detested. An odd pick, if you like, on the part of Winston Churchill. They go into the Kremlin.

And Stalin is unbelievably rude to them. He doesn't believe a word of what they're saying. He doesn't think all these promises they're making about supporting the Red Army in its hour of need. You know, they bring a letter from Churchill. Stalin doesn't even open it. He tosses it aside and treats them very, very badly.

They have a second meeting on the next night, and this goes much better, partly because I think Churchill chose Beaverbrook and Harriman because they were charming and they could deliver. These were the guys, they had the ear of Churchill and they had the ear of Roosevelt. And so when they said things, they could back it up.

And so they went into Stalin on that second meeting, and they literally had a list of munitions, of tanks, of planes, of whatever, that they could supply to the Soviet Union. And suddenly... Stalin sort of sits up and takes notice. And in fact, his interpreter at the time just stands up at that point and says, we're going to win the war.

when he sees what these two multimillionaires are offering. And so this is really the very beginnings of, you know, many of your, you know, listeners and viewers will know about or will have heard of Lendlease. This is the beginning. of the lend-lease program by which American military might is going to be funneled into the Soviet Union to supply Stalin with the weapons he needs.

Oh, I see. Okay, so it wasn't... How much were the British actually offering? Was it predominantly American? It was. The British were offering stuff and would offer more as the war went on. But 1941, it was... a desperate time for Great Britain that they really didn't have anything to offer at the time. This was mainly American stuff at that time. And Len Lease was difficult for Roosevelt. He just won a second election by then. Or was that, was the second, no, the third election? Yeah, yeah.

Was that in 1940, late 40? It was late 40, I think. Yeah, yeah. It was very difficult for... Roosevelt, because there was a very, very powerful America First movement at the time, very vociferous and very powerful in Washington. And they were saying... Vocally, we should not be supporting Stalin. They're actually saying this is absurd. We're going to the sport of the very man who'd like to wipe us off the face of the planet, you know. And so this was a tough sell for Roosevelt.

But he pulled it off. He got it through Congress. And from that point on, really, I mean, it's a fascinating... the logistical sort of challenge that America faced. And what happened or what would end up happening is, you know, all the vast kind of automobile factories in Detroit, you know, which turning out millions of vehicles each year.

Everything was turned over to producing jeeps, tanks, and planes, not just for the Soviet Union, for Great Britain, and for America itself, of course. But, you know, that industrial might was on a... truly grand scale. No other country in the world could compete with this.

And it was a man like Avril Harriman who had the direct ear of Roosevelt that was able to present the case for doing this in very powerful language. Okay, so the Russians, they weren't actually charmed. They just saw the list of gear and were like, yeah, yes, please, we'll take it. Yeah. And I think throughout the course of the war, Stalin continued to be impressed by Roosevelt, not as a political leader, but simply as a representative of this nation that was so industrially powerful.

that Stalin himself would like to build inside the Soviet Union. Okay. So what was the relationship of Roosevelt? I know about after the war and Truman and, you know, they're absolutely... Even during the war, actually, they're conscious about Soviet infiltration, the communists in America. Before the war, what's the relationship of America with communism? Is there a deeply anti-communist?

sentiment. We've already explored what Churchill's approach was to it, but what's the American version of that? Yeah, there is an anti-American, sorry, anti-communist sentiment. quite a powerful one, and particularly an anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet system voice is very powerful. As I said, there were powerful voices in Congress who were speaking up against everything that the Soviet Union stood for.

And so, this makes the transformation even more remarkable when you think that America is also going to get into bed with Stalin. And this is where... he goes from being Stalin to cuddly old Uncle Joe, you know. So this is where they really have to try and change the image of this monster in the Kremlin and make him sound like a sort of, yeah, a lovely avuncular figure.

Presumably part of that is by emphasizing how evil Hitler was. Oh, absolutely. Yes. So back to a practical question. How does the weaponry and munitions get from America? to Russia. Is it via the Bering Strait? Well, that's a fascinating one because it was the Arctic convoys, of course, they were shipped.

across the Atlantic. The ships would stop in Iceland, often do a turnaround in Iceland, and then new ships would go on from Iceland to Archangel, again, right up in the north of Russia. The problem... with the Arctic convoys is you have prowling German U-boats which are sinking them. And by 1942, they're sinking them so dramatically and so much military hardware is going to the bottom of the North Sea that they have to stop them completely to Stalin's absolute horror.

And they have to think of another way around this. How the hell are we going to get stuff into the Soviet Union? And Avril Harriman, this envoy to Churchill and later to Stalin, he hits on a rather brilliant idea. He is a railroad man. He runs the Union... Pacific Railroad, which is this massive company in America.

And he looks at a map and he realizes there's a railroad that runs right the way up from the south of Iran to the north of Iran and then into the Caucasus and the back door of the Soviet Union. And he says, hold on a minute, we should be using this railway line. The British had tried to use it, but very ineffectively. They brought over steam trains from British India.

When you're crossing a desert and your steam train needs a lot of water, it's not the greatest place to run a steam network. Avril Harriman looks at this. says we need diesel locomotives. We've got them in California, brings them over to Iran. This all happens in a matter of weeks. Brings over 42,000 railway men to run this operation. I mean, it's on such a huge scale. and kind of overnight.

This new way of delivering weaponry to the Soviet Union is opened up. So they're getting shipped around? To the Persian Gulf, yes. So around Africa, around the southern type of Africa. Into the Persian Gulf, and then there. loaded onto trains at that point and then taken into the Soviet Union. Okay. So we have this, the meeting goes well then with Stalin. What is the... How does the relationship develop after that?

Stalin, he is constantly calling for a second front. He desperately needs the British Americans to take some pressure off the Red Army, which is being absolutely... pummeled on the Eastern Front. I mean, the Germans are advancing. They have three battle groups. They're advancing deep into Soviet territory.

And by November, December 1941, they're knocking on the gates of Moscow. They're 20, 30 kilometers away. They can see the gilded domes in the distance. So Stalin is in a very desperate situation. situation. He evacuates the city, all the embassies are moved out, they're moved far east, so they're out of reach of the Luftwaffe, but it looks like Moscow is going to fall. So yeah, there's a real crisis.

crisis point at this point. Okay. And so, uh, uh, but by that time they have the, the, the, the, the, the lend lease has begun. So they have to kick in. Okay. So, uh,

What then occurs? How does Stalin... Well, then this kicks in, American weaponry starts to arrive in the Soviet Union, but there's another arrival that comes at exactly this point, which is greatly beneficial for Stalin, and that is the winter. And this, of course, stops a German army in its tracks and saves Moscow, because Moscow will not fall.

ever to the Wehrmacht. They, of course, knocking on the gates of Leningrad at the time, now St. Petersburg, of course, and down in the south, Kiev as well. The German army is spreading out, but it's halted at the gates of Moscow. And this is going to be... really this is a crucial sort of the first turning point the first setback if you like for hitler okay and so and so uh would presumably then without that winter and without without american and brit and british supplies

Would Stalin have had even a chance of fighting back? It's really, really difficult to know what difference over this whole course of the war... the influx of American and British weaponry made to the Soviet Union. Now, both Stalin and Khrushchev said in private... that they wouldn't have won the war without it, but they would never, ever say that in public. Certainly by 1944, there was so much.

American weaponry in the Soviet Union. So many jeeps, so many tanks, and not just tanks, it was also the raw materials. So the Americans were shipping in high-grade steel. They were shipping in aluminium, which was really important for tank engines, which the Soviets couldn't produce.

They were shipping in food as well, of course, because the Soviet Union was virtually starving. Massive quantities of grain were being taken into the Soviet Union. That's been overlooked completely by the history books. Starving because that normally have come from Ukraine. Exactly. That had all been occupied and destroyed by the advancing Wehrmacht.

Oh, I see. Okay. And what were the capabilities of the Soviets in terms of manufacturing? Were they able to produce any of their own... Well, they were, but the problem was... Most of their industrial plants were situated in land now occupied by the Wehrmacht. So they'd lost that. But what they'd done, there'd been this great process of dismantling factories and moving them east beyond the Ural Mountains. But the problem is...

it took a long time to take a factory apart and rebuild it 2,000 miles to the east. So there was a hiatus, there was a period where they had very little weaponry and they were unable to produce much weaponry as well. And this was really that crisis period. around the end of 1941, beginning of 1942. And there are three great meetings, aren't there, between the world leaders of Stalin and Churchill, although eventually it's Attlee, and then...

Roosevelt, of course, dies near the end of the war, and he's replaced by Truman. But there's three... Great meetings between the leaders of these three nations, the main allied nations. And the first of them is in Tehran. It is. But the three are, just for the record, the three are Tehran, they're at Yalta, and then they're at Potsdam in the summer of 1945.

But Tehran is preceded by a very, very important meeting, and I think it's worth touching on, which is where Winston Churchill, in the summer of 1942, he decides... to go to Moscow to meet face-to-face his archenemy, Joseph Stalin, now turned into an ally. And it's an absolutely fascinating meeting because Churchill arrives and is taken into the Kremlin. And they sit down in Stalin's office and...

It is a disaster. Stalin is rude. He insults Churchill. He gets it in any possible way. He sort of needles him. He really gets under his skin. He even brings up the Gallipoli landings from the first. World War. And he says to Churchill, they failed because of stupidities in planning and execution, knowing full well Churchill's involvement in the Gallipoli landing. So he really...

profoundly insulted Winston Churchill. And Churchill that night, he goes back to the dacha where he's staying with his aides, and he said, I'm flying home, I'm tearing up the alliance, I'm having no more to do with this monster in the Kremlin.

And he's deadly serious. And his aides, they're saying him, they're begging him to stay. They say, you cannot do this. This is the end of the alliance. This is a disaster. This is brilliant for Hitler. You're tearing up the alliance. And this is one of the sort of key characters in my book comes in at this point, and that's the British ambassador in Moscow, Archie Clark Kerr, who's a consummate diplomat, a friend of Winston Churchill.

who knew his strengths, but also knew his weaknesses. And he says... to Winston Churchill, are you really going to let this ignorant peasant of a man in the Kremlin, you know, send you back to London? Are you really going to let him destroy this relationship? And Archie persuades Churchill to go into the Kremlin one more time.

Just meet just him and Stalin face-to-face with an interpreter. He said, get drunk with him. Just do whatever you can, but come back. I want you to be met basically best buddies with Stalin by the time you come out. And sure enough, at the end of that evening... Churchill comes back to the Dacha, having drunk an awful lot of Caucasian champagne and Russian vodka, and he says, I've cemented a friendship with Stalin.

And it's a really key moment, really, because this is going to keep the Alliance on track for the rest of the war. And it really is that you've... I kind of feel when I read this stuff written by Archie Clark Kerr that... They don't make diplomats like him anymore. He was really, truly skillful because he had a profound understanding of human nature, you know, and he knew how to get people on his side. And so he, more than anyone else, really saved.

the big three relationship at that point. Do we know anything about that drunken night between those? two leaders. We do. We know absolutely everything about it because Archie persuaded the interpreter to write down everything that happened that night. It's absolutely fascinating. So the two men were sitting in Stalin's study. And Stalin says, let's go and eat together, takes him to his private apartment, calls his daughter Svetlana, this redheaded daughter, to come and serve them drinks.

And he has this array of alcohol in front of them, champagne, wine, Caucasian wine, which was what Stalin drank, vodka, and this very, very high alcohol vodka, at which point the British interpreter turns to Churchill and said, do not drink this. This is very bad news. And for once, Churchill actually listens, which is probably good for the Allied Alliance. But Churchill comes back and he is full of it.

It's an amazing thing. Stalin this and Stalin that. Stalin was wonderful. And Stalin, he even brought his redheaded daughter to serve me. And, you know, he's... It's peculiar sort of loving he has with Stalin at that point. It's very, very bizarre. And he's saying, I can't wait to go back to Britain and to tell everyone how wonderful Stalin is. Do you know if they were talking politics or were they just talking?

anything and everything. They were talking everything. Now, the other thing about Stalin, which is worth mentioning, which Churchill realized at this point and which his ambassador, Archie Clark Kerr, had been telling him all along. is do not underestimate this guy. Yeah, he looks like an ignorant peasant, the way he dresses, the way he talks, even.

He's extremely shrewd. He's extremely well-read. He's extremely manipulative. And I think Churchill at that point got this first hint that actually he was dealing... with, if you like, a malevolent genius that Stalin knew exactly what he wanted. He was extremely well-informed. And you asked about the conversation.

He even launched into a conversation about tactics at the Battle of Blenheim. And he was very widely read Stalin's. It wasn't he was just on his blinkered sort of communist propaganda stuff. He'd read Hemingway, he'd read Faulkner. you know, and he annotated everything. So he had 20,000 books in his library and he annotated when he disagreed with something, he just write piss off in the margin. Wow. Yeah. So when that first meeting before the drunken night. Yeah.

Stalin behaves as he did. What does that tell us about Stalin's character? Presumably, tactically, that was foolish in that he must have seen Churchill as an an ally of some sort against the Nazis, or at least part of the relationship with America must have tied up with Churchill. Why did he think it would be a good idea to be so rude? It's just...

It's impossible to fathom Stalin, I think, sometimes. And in fact, the three people who are closest to Stalin during the war, or two people, Avril Harriman, who was then posted to Moscow and worked alongside Stalin in the Kremlin. And Archie Clark Kerr, who likewise worked alongside Stalin in the Kremlin, seeing him day in, day out, at the end of the war, they could not fathom him out. They said his behaviour is so extraordinary. Archie said one thing that I thought was very interesting.

He said, when you see... Churchill and Stalin together. He said, I have the impression that these are just two very needy people. They need each other. He said, it's very, very odd when you've got the two of the three most powerful men in the world needing each other. wanting to be liked by each other. It's very extraordinary. So it actually comes to a point where Stalin does want to be liked by Churchill. I think so, yes. So it's like a sort of erratic...

It's very odd. Yeah. And in fact, Avril Harriman writes this rather wonderful account. I can read it out later if you like. It's very short, but just saying that how he said, first of all, Stalin... He knows he's a mass murderer. He knows he's this evil, horrible tyrant. And yet, he said to me personally, he was always the most gracious and courteous person I've had to deal with. And he also says that of the big three wartime leaders, him...

Churchill and Roosevelt, he said, without a doubt, Stalin was the most effective because Stalin knew what he wanted and he knew how he was going to get it. And did he, did Stalin... He didn't have the strongest hand. It would have been Roosevelt who had the strongest hand. So despite that, I mean, I guess Churchill would have had the weakest hand, perhaps, of the three of them. I mean, it was...

It was a relationship of unequals, I think, already by the time we get to the Tehran conference at the end of 1942. I mean, Churchill writes a very telling phrase. He said, there I sat at the conference, he said, and I had the great Russian bear on one side of me, its paws outstretched. And he said, on the other hand, on the other side, I had the great American buffalo sitting next to me.

And he said, there I was in the middle, the little English donkey. And he did feel, I think, that you have this industrial power. on one side and this vast country on the other, you know. And I think he, you know, great imperialist that Churchill was, he felt that the power of Great Britain and the British Empire was slipping from his hands. And it really, it upset.

set him and left him deeply depressed. Yeah, yeah, quite. And is this the first time that Roosevelt meets Starling? It is, yeah. And what do we know about Roosevelt's impressions and how those two are getting along? Well, everyone who saw Roosevelt... in dialogue with Stalin was appalled at his naivety. He believed what Stalin said. And so, for instance, just to give one example, Stalin said to Roosevelt, you know, at the end of the war, he said,

Probably the Red Army will have occupied the Baltic states. But he said, don't worry. What we'll do, we'll hold a plebiscite and see who they want to be ruled by. Roosevelt sort of turns to him and says, well, that's a jolly good idea. I support that. And all his aides are sort of clutching their head in their hands saying, does he not realize that any plebiscite run by Joseph Stalin is quite likely to go the way that Joseph Stalin wants?

the deal with the devil where it's starting to backfire. Yes, absolutely. The other thing is worth mentioning at these great conferences, Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, is the ability... of Stalin to modify his language and this this shows a sort of

Interesting understanding of human nature, if you like. So when he's dealing with his own people, he issues commands that are to be obeyed. There is no doubt in his mind. He leaves no doubt about what he's saying. An order or an instruction, and it is to be done. When he turns to the British and Americans, he's this emollient, maybe we could do this, or have we thought about doing this? And his interpreters never cease to be amazed by the way that Stalin was able, chameleon-like, to change.

change his tone of voice or change his attitude according to who he was speaking to. And they thought that was a real, sort of extraordinary... political acumen, if you like, to be able to do that. This was a man who'd hardly ever travelled outside the Soviet Union, who didn't really know much about the outside world. And yet to be able to do that...

to be able to talk with Roosevelt. Roosevelt, behind Churchill's back, had suggested that the two of them solve the problem of British India. I mean, this is real politic gone mad, you know. And Stalin... that point, delivers this monologue about the caste system in India. So, extraordinary, really. Criticising the caste system. Criticising it, but just the fact he knew about it and was able to talk fluently about it.

really stunned everyone in his presence at that time. Ah, okay. I'm a little surprised that Roosevelt would behave like this, not least because I imagine by that point... The Americans are quite conscious that there are Soviet spies and collaborators working in...

America? Or am I wrong to think that? I think you are, actually, because, I mean, the atomic program, which obviously had been infiltrated by Soviet spies, they knew everything about it. Stalin knew exactly what was going on. That was not... I mean, that really was not known in America. In fact, it was really 1946 when all of that came out. And I mean, it's been said, and it's quite possibly true, that President Truman, who took over from Roosevelt on his death in April 45, I'm sorry.

President Truman probably knew less about the American atomic program than Stalin did, because he was not privy to everything that was taking place, the research and the whole program taking place in America. Whereas Stalin had all his spies who'd infiltrated it and knew everything about it. So, then we come to the next meeting. Yalta. Yalta. I know we're zooming through immense history here, which must be frustrating, but we come to 45.

And how have the relationships between these three men changed and developed over that period? So Yalta is the most fascinating conference. This sees Churchill and Roosevelt fly into the Crimea with... hundreds and hundreds of staff. They bring all their food, cutlery, crockery, everything. This is extraordinary. And then they face this six-hour drive down to Yalta, which has been completely destroyed by German troops. They're housed in...

these vast palaces in Yalta. And they will come face to face to really, the point of the Yalta conference is to sort out the architecture of the post-war world. Who is going to get what? And how is it going to be ruled? So the Yalta on the opening night before the conference actually starts, in fact, Stalin pays a visit. on Roosevelt. It's a very interesting evening they have. Roosevelt mixes vodka martinis, as he was accustomed to do, and complains to Stalin that there are no lemons.

And the next day, Roosevelt wakes up and opens his bedroom door and there is a lemon tree covered in lemons, which Stalin overnight has had flown in from the Caucasus, you know, to make a point. Anyway, the conference gets off the ground. Roosevelt looks terrible. Everyone who sees Roosevelt can't believe how pale, ashen-faced

and how just he's not really functioning properly. And there's a good reason for that. He's dying and will be dead, you know, in just a few months. So the conference is in February 45. He's going to die in April 45. And he's so ill that one of the sessions actually has to be held in his... bedroom with him in bed um churchill as well is not on form he's old

He's tired. You know, he's been running the war for the last four or five years. He's just exhausted. And as one of his aides, Cadogan, said, you know, he's drinking bucketfuls of Caucasian champagne. They're trying to stop him drinking all the time. Only Stalin himself is really on form and Stalin...

is in a very, very strong position indeed, because the Red Army by now is in control of pretty much all of Eastern Europe, of the Baltic states, of much of Central Europe. It's in Poland, and it's kind of knocking on the gates of Germany. Colin is there, sitting there, aware that really his army already controls the territory he covets at the end of the war. So it's a very unequal relationship by February 1945.

Part of the theme of the show, as I mentioned, was exploring the post-war consensus. But here we actually have the practical... division of the spoils, I guess. Yeah, they're literally sitting down with maps and deciding who gets what. So one aspect of this, which is odd for the British, is that we joined the war upon the Nazi invasion of Poland.

And so you might rightly argue, I think, that one of our war aims was the defense of Poland, which we did not achieve because we handed it to the Soviets. So in a way... In terms of defeating the Nazis, yes, we won that aspect of the war. But in terms of defending Poland, the very reason we entered the war, we... Los? I'm so glad you mentioned this, because often people don't mention Poland, and Poland is absolutely crucial at Yalta, but generally for the post-war...

period. Because what happened is at the Yalta conference, Churchill delivers this very powerful monologue saying, you know, for me, Poland is a matter of honour. And you're right, Britain came into the war because of Poland. And this is Stalin, again, his mastery of language. He just turns to Churchill and said, if Poland is a matter of honor for Mr. Churchill, then it's a matter of life and death for the Soviet Union.

And so what Stalin has done very deviously, there is, of course, there's been the Polish government in exile in London throughout the war, which has been functioning in London. He sets up a second government in exile. in Moscow, full of communists. And through that government in exile, he encourages the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, where you'll see this mass uprising against the Nazi occupiers. Now, he does this on the...

He gives the impression that the Red Army, which is after all just outside Warsaw at this point, will come to their aid. But once the Warsaw uprising happens, he refuses any aid. And in fact, in an absolute act of... total cynicism. He's encouraged the Warsaw Uprising to ensure that as many of the elite still left in Poland will be wiped out by the Nazis. Absolutely extraordinary, really. What is the... Why do the...

presumably because he has his hope is to take Poland. He absolutely intends to take Poland, yes. Why is it that Stalin wants Poland? You'll have to remind me on... Was he an international communist? Was it part of a sort of world communist thing? Or did they need Poland as a sort of economic... It would help build the Soviet empire because of its economic significance? I think it's...

Both. I mean, yes, he was an international, or he had been an international communist. He was one of the founding members of the Comintern, which, you know, its express aim was to topple the democracies of Western Europe. But I think by this point, it genuinely was.

a buffer zone as well that, you know, no one would be able to invade the Soviet Union without going through Poland. Well, if you control Poland, you've made it that much more difficult. So I think that was, uh, but of course, let's not forget, he didn't just want Poland. He wanted Germany as well. And then you

have, of course, then will probably come on to the post-war division of Germany and what happens there. But he wanted, yeah, as much territory as was possible. It's worth pointing out, because I think it's very interesting that ideologically... Stalin underwent a dramatic shift during the war. that I think he realized that the Soviet people would fight for Holy Mother Russia, but they might not necessarily fight for the Soviet system. And so he has this great transformation in 1943.

And my ambassador, Archie Clark Kerr, who I mentioned earlier, he's astonished one day. He goes into Stalin's study, and the portraits and marks and angles have come down, and they've been replaced by Tsarist generals, Tsarist heroes. And at the same time, suddenly the churches are opened again. Suddenly Stalin reinstalls a patriarch on the throne, the patriarchal throne of the Orthodox Church of Russia. And this is all a... a part of...

Stalin's policy to revive the idea of Holy Mother Russia, which he thinks will unite the nation behind him. He's right, it does, you know, but it is an extraordinary change of tone. Suddenly, sort of communism gets brushed on. under the carpet. And we have this new imperial sort of grandeur that comes over the city. Because he understood psychology. And there's a very bizarre, I can't remember which.

previous guest has said this, but I asked about why Stalin was so popular today in Russia. And it's almost an inversion of that. It's because Stalin led the war effort to defeat the Nazis. And of course, was it 10, 20 million? Russians would... No one really knows, but it's millions and millions and millions. On that, you're right. I mean, statues of Stalin are going up everywhere. Going up? Yeah, they're being put up everywhere in Russia.

In Piscoff, for example, they've just erected a huge great statue of Stalin, blessed by the church and everything. Absolutely extraordinary. Wow. And there's even stories of Volga. being renamed Stalingrad again. So yeah, it's a really weird phenomenon taking place. Wow, that's absolutely astonishing. So Yalta is the, they decide on how they're going to carve everything up, presumably.

Churchill's still not got a great hand. He's kind of at the mercy of these two emergent empires. And what's the... Before we leave Yalta, because this is also just before D-Day that's on the horizon, this is the last time Roosevelt is with either of them. It is, yeah. Is there any other significance to Yalta?

Well, of course, the United Nations is the other big topic for discussion. This is Roosevelt's great sort of idea that he wants the UN to be the world's policeman at the end of the war. And he's trying to get Stalin to sign up to it. is very reluctant and sort of reluctantly does sign up at the end. And so Roosevelt goes away.

happy at that. He's also very happy that Stalin agrees to join the war in the Far East, which is proving immensely costly in American lives. Waging war on Japan. Yeah, exactly. War against Japan, which he will go through with, but he'll come in. pretty much on the last day. And so the spirit at the end of the ALTA conference is one of incredible optimism. Everyone goes away.

feeling that the problems of the world have been solved and that the post-war world is going to be a peaceful place and it's going to be underpinned. by the big three alliance is going to continue into the post-war world. So this alliance has helped to crush Hitler. And remember, by February 45, Hitler is...

obviously going to lose the war, you know. So this alliance, which has won the war, is also going to safeguard the peace. That's very surprising, given what we've already described, particularly with Churchill's understanding of communism, that suddenly he's... Churchill can't possibly think at that point that there's going to be a good relationship with the Soviet Union communists. I mean, yeah, it seems quite extraordinary.

Avril and Archie, the two men on the ground who are working alongside Stalin and the Kremlin, they are constantly saying, this isn't going to work. This is what Churchill said publicly. We don't yet know. what he was thinking privately, but maybe we can come on to the operation he wanted to...

carry out in 1945, very little known about, I found in the National Archives a quite extraordinary file called Operation Unthinkable. And this was Churchill's idea, which he asked his chiefs of staff to prepare in 1945. in the beginning of the summer of 1945, which was to turn all the Allied forces in Europe at that time, British, American, Canadian, and others, against the Red Army and have a massive...

battle to try and snuff out the Red Army once and for all. And the chiefs of staff worked out this very detailed plan. There's pages and pages of documents. They planned that there'd be a titanic sort of battle in what is now Poland, which would... The idea was this would smash the Red Army and basically reduce it to dust. The chiefs of staff realized that the... amount of troops, quantitative troops in Europe at the time, American, the Allies basically, was not enough.

on its own to defeat the Red Army. And they said, the only way you can do this is to bring the Wehrmacht and the SS on side. And at this point, they realized that politically, this was... simply impossible you know you can't do that and which is why the file was noted operation unthinkable and placed in the national archives okay so he would never he although he might have compromised to work with

Stalin, he would never compromise to work with the Nazis. Exactly. But this was not public. And in fact, really, the first time Churchill... publicly stands up and condemns Stalin, is going to take place in the following year, in 1946, when he delivers his famous Iron Curtain speech in Missouri, in America. Remind me what he says then. He says... Well, the famous phrase is he says this is where he this speech is where on a world stage he publicly tears up.

this alliance, you know, and says, this is finished, it's over, Stalin has gone from being wartime ally to enemy. And the resonant line was, from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron coat. curtain has descended over the continent. And it was a speech that was roundly condemned around the world. The British government, the Labour government was shocked by this speech. Politicians in America were shocked by this speech.

Everyone was turning to Truman and saying, did you know what he was going to say? Truman had read the speech on the train to Missouri. He said, no, I didn't have a clue what he was going to say. You know, classic politician's answer. Okay. So back to your earlier...

statement that people left Yalta thinking very positively, well, Roosevelt's dying, nearly dead. Churchill, it doesn't actually seem like he is positive about the Soviet Union and whatsoever. He might- openly profess it but secretly if you look at all his other behavior and he's saying he's

thinking something different. So coming out of Yalta, actually, it's not necessarily... Stalin has promised them free elections. There's going to be plebiscites. They're not going to be Red Army-dominated governments, communist-dominated governments. He's talking a good talk, you know, and...

They swallow it. And that's what I'm saying. My men on the ground are saying, don't believe a word of what this guy's saying to you. So before Missouri, though, there's Potsdam. So this is after the Nazis have surrendered. killed himself, but before the Japanese. Exactly. This is July 1945. So we have peace in Europe, but the Second World War is not completely at an end. And this is where the big three meet again, except the big three have changed.

Churchill comes for the beginning of the conference, but only the British would hold a British general election halfway through this incredibly important conference. And what happens? Churchill loses. And so he goes home halfway through the conference and is replaced by Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, which somewhat undermines the British negotiating strategy, has to be said.

Roosevelt has died, and so he's been replaced by his vice president, Harry Truman. Harry Truman is a man with virtually no experience of foreign affairs whatsoever. Comes to Potsdam, and actually... plays a pretty good game. He's been well briefed and he has a trump card in his pocket, which he pulls out halfway through the conference, which is when he tells Stalin. that the Americans have developed an extraordinarily powerful weapon.

He gets this wonderful coded message at the conference and it's delivered to him. And the coded message says, the patient has been operated on and the operation has been successful. And that was the talking about the Trinity test and the exploding of the test. of the atomic bomb.

Truman tells Stalin this, he says, and he's rather expecting Stalin to be tremendously impressed by this news. And Stalin just says, great, use it against the Japanese. That's all he says. So I'd actually heard a version of that story where Stalin goes, I know.

Oh, I've not heard him saying that. But maybe that's just a post-war myth. Churchill was listening into the conversation because he knew, Truman had told him, hey, I'm going to tell Stalin tonight. And he doesn't mention ever that Stalin said that. But Stalin...

clearly did know he knew every detail of it oh because he had his spies yeah yeah the operation yeah so you have churchill and truman arrive and then stalin arrives i mean and stalin arrives in some splendor i mean he's dusted off the czarist imperial train and arrives in Potsdam in this train and he looks every inch the military victor. He's in a white generalissimo's military uniform.

And he's on good form. I mean, his health is suffering, it should be said. But he's on good form in the sense that he knows he's got pretty much what he wants. Wow. So this...

Just on Clement Attlee. Yeah. He was obviously a key figure in the British coalition government through the war. But he is a Labour Party man. I don't know too much about Attlee, but I'm assuming a socialist. What's his attitude to Stalin? And does that change the British...

attitude to Soviet Union with him being elected prime minister? I mean, Attlee, I think, has been pretty much on message with Churchill all the way through. And he was invited to the conference at the beginning because there was this uncertainty over the election. I think maybe... More importantly is Ernest Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary at the time, who was extraordinarily pugnacious, and although from a socialist background and steeped in the Labour Party.

He totally mistrusted Stalin and was very aggressive towards him. His first words to Stalin were, I'll not have Britain barged about, you know. But of course, by the time... the new Labour representatives got there, it was kind of too late. The conference was wrapping up and all the big work had been done. And I think we should probably talk about...

Germany and what's going to happen to Germany, because that's going to be the key, really, thing that, you know, is set in motion. This is the big carve-up then of Germany. This is a big carve-up, yeah. which had already been decided on at the Yalta Conference, gets fleshed out at the Potsdam Conference. And essentially, I mean, many people will know this already, but Germany is divided into two. The Soviets are going to get the eastern half of Germany and run it according to their system.

of government, and the West of Germany is going to be divided between Britain, America, and France. Stalin said to Truman, you know, why France? They haven't done anything in this war. But Churchill was very insistent that France had a role to play in the post-war period, and he wanted France to be there.

I would have gone against Churchill that hearing about how they surrendered. I mean, although de Gaulle would have been involved, right? And so the honor of France was sort of contained in the free French. But I think also Churchill was aware. that in this uncertain post-war world, France was still, was a power to be reckoned with and you wanted them on your side, you know. At the very least as a ballast against. Exactly. Remember as well, all the American troops are going home.

I mean, Europe is being emptied of American troops, and this is a source of real concern for Churchill as well, because he thinks, you know, if something goes wrong... Just no one left to fight except, you know, the remnants of the British army, really. Right. Anyway, the point is that Germany is divided into two.

And when they come to Berlin, Berlin, of course, had been the great prize in the Second World War. You know, all those troops landing on D-Day, they'd be chalking on their tanks, you know, to Berlin. This was the ultimate goal. But the Soviets got there first. The Soviets controlled the city.

But the decision was to divide Berlin in exactly the same way that Germany itself was divided. So the Soviets get the east half of the city, the Brits, Americans and French get the west half of the city. But if you look at a map... Berlin sits fairly and squarely in the Soviet-occupied area of eastern Germany, and it didn't take a military genius to look at a map and think…

If the Soviets wanted to cut the road and rail links into West Berlin, we'd be completely stuffed. We'd have our garrisons there. We wouldn't be able to resupply them. we'd be responsible for two and a half million Berliners in the Western sectors. We wouldn't be able to feed them. We wouldn't be able to supply fuel for them because everything had traditionally for Berlin had come from what was Eastern Germany. And so...

Those on the ground realise from the very beginning that we're potentially creating a really, really disastrous situation here where we could be under a siege situation with the Soviets blockading the city. So why did they allow it then? Was it that they had no real... I think there was no real hand. I think also they thought there's no way Stalin would ever dare to do that.

rewind four years. Fast forward four years and that's precisely what's going to happen. Did they have a sense at that time about how that border would become an iron curtain and a real, you know, even today, there's parts of the wall in Berlin that's still up. And you get, you know, was it Checkpoint Charlie? And you see how it was prison-like the walls were.

Was there a sense at that point that it would end up looking like that? No, none at all. Because at that point, there was no border between the sectors. The wall didn't go up until 1962, I think it was. So there was a very long period where you could cross...

quite freely between the British sector and the Soviet sector, for example. And some people will be familiar with those signs, you are now leaving the British sector, you know, they were on all the main roads, but you could cross freely. But as relations... began to grow ever more tense from 1945, 46, 47 between the Western partners and the Soviets.

there began to be a more sharply delineated line between the sectors. So you begin to get barriers erected and then barbed wire fences and then, you know, gun emplacements. And we're gradually moving forwards to the formal division of the city. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, famously, you know, the film The Third Man, which of course goes into that. I mean, very similar situations at the beginning. Then they have a different story in Vienna and really everything, the tensions.

of the post-war, really everything becomes focused on Berlin and what's going to happen to Berlin. So that, I guess, will take us into a whole other history and the Cold War history. Curious on the sort of ideas side of things here in this period. And we looked at a lot of Karl Popper because he's perhaps one of the most famous of the post-war philosophers.

who himself was an Austrian Jew who exiled to New Zealand. His war effort was the Open Society and its enemies. But you sort of have... Despite the fact that so begins this Cold War between... The free world and the totalitarian communist world with literal hard borders that are growing. And this is sort of only getting worse. Despite that, you at the same time have this philosophy where...

Communism is not seen as evil as Nazism and the authoritarian nature of this empire and this now a civilization where... And particularly, I mean, through the 50s, many hundreds of thousands are killed in the Red Terror. We know about the Gulag, where millions were sent. Perhaps it's because that information comes out later. I'm not quite sure, but so begins this bizarre psychological relationship or differing relationship between these.

two totalitarian regimes and i wondered if you had insight into why that might be that why we went on why we have now today even still this different um understanding of communism as opposed to Nazism, as not necessarily as evil as Nazism. Well, I think the great fear in the aftermath of the Second World War, and this is represented most eloquently by George Kennan, who was the American diplomat working in the American embassy in Moscow, is that...

The Soviet Union was an empire that was always seeking new land. And I mean, this is very sort of interesting, given the situation in Ukraine at the moment, that he wrote this famous long telegram, which became one of the most sort of... one of the best-known documents of the second half of the 20th century, where it had this resonant phrase that the Soviet Union, it doesn't understand the logic of reason, it only understands the logic of force.

And this would come to underpin American foreign policy, the formation of NATO, Article 5. All of this is born out of the idea that the Soviets, whenever they can make a land grab, they will. But doesn't that support the idea that practically there's a kind of common understanding that the Soviets are the enemy of the West now? Yes. Maybe I'm even wrong to bring this. Maybe I'm trying to fit two things that aren't quite right together. Karl Marx, who is the intellectual seed of that empire.

and Lenin after him. They don't have the There's not a common understanding of this evil ideology. Everyone understood that Nazis were evil, and the Nazi ideology was evil, because it was. But we didn't have that same thing happen with Marxism. I think you're right, yeah. And look, when... when Churchill had to choose between which one to support and which one to go to war against, he said, well, it's without a doubt, Nazism is more evil than the Soviet Union, the Soviet system. Yeah.

So maybe it's as simple as that. So having done all this research for your book and covering this amazing history, were you... Was there anything you discovered that you think went against common understanding? Do you think that there's any history of the war period that we've not told ourselves correctly? Was there anything you uncovered? You're like, oh, actually, I think we...

lying to ourself about this or we actually misunderstood this aspect of history. I think there's an element of cynical pragmatism that I had not quite considered when I set out to write the book.

So, for example, the Katyn massacre. This is where tens of thousands of Polish intellectuals, military leaders, etc. were killed in cold blood in the Katyn forest. And the question hanging over that massacre... was who committed it. Was it the Nazis or was it the Soviets? And so when the Soviets reclaimed Katyn Forest and exhumed all these bodies, there was a great investigation that went on and press teams were sent in to investigate.

And every corpse that was exhumed had papers, letters, diaries, etc., that pointed to the fact that the Nazis had committed this atrocity. They hadn't. Stalin had ordered the atrocity, and this was a monumental exercise in distorting the truth, in really making it look like the Nazis had done it when in fact the Soviets had done it.

And what's interesting about that, I think, and that in itself is extraordinarily cynical, but when Churchill is informed about this and Archie, his ambassador in Moscow, says, of course it was the Soviets that did this. Churchill doesn't want to know because this is an inconvenient truth. And so he just says, maybe it was the Soviets, but it will have been some junior general. It won't have been Stalin, you know. And I think throughout, when you're in bed with the devil...

you have to have that cynical pragmatism. But it still surprised me and often astonished me to read it, you know, in the archives. I'd like to lift up Churchill, but I'd also keep in mind that the pressure that you're under in these circumstances, I'm not sure I've made a better decision. I assure you I'm in no way a Churchill baster. I think he's a quite astonishing individual.

And I think that U-turn he performed in June 1941 was an astonishing act of political bravery, you know. But I'm really just pointing out that when you're in an alliance, which you have to be in… It creates very, very uncomfortable situations. What would the counter history be if he hadn't managed to turn that first meeting around? What would...

How would things play differently? It's so hard to know because would Roosevelt have pulled out of that his alliance with Stalin? Possibly. Would Stalin have carried on fighting? Almost certainly. I think the Germans were ultimately doomed on the Eastern Front anyway. But I think certainly all the Lendley's weaponry, etc. It hugely speeded up the war. As I mentioned earlier, Stalin said, without it, we wouldn't have won the war.

That might be the case, but certainly the war might have gone on for at least another year or two years on the Eastern Front had it not been for tens of thousands of American tanks and jeeps. It's a phenomenal history. We've covered an unbelievable amount of ground. So it's quite a talent on your part to be able to do so in such a compelling way. And I absolutely love the conversation. I want to take...

us over to the subset for a slightly different conversation. We're going to just have a brief one about your other book, White Gold. But before we do that, of course, I want to bring attention to viewers and listeners to The Stalin Affair, The Impossible Alliance, The War, your book. But is there anything else?

on this topic that you think that I have missed that is crucial? And is there anything you'd like to bring listeners and viewers attention to, maybe your social media or work that you'd like highlighted? Let me tell you one anecdote, because I think it speaks volumes. and it astonished me. When Avril Harriman, Roosevelt's envoy to Stalin during the war, went to Stalin at the end of the war, and Stalin, they had their final meeting.

And Stalin said to Avril Harriman, you've been a great friend to the Soviet Union during the war, and you've been a great friend to me personally. I'd like to give you a gift. And the gift he handed over was... truly magnificent. It was this wonderful copy of the American Great Seal, you know, with the eagle and everything. And it was hand-carved in wood. Astonishing work of artistry. And Averill was, you know, genuinely and deeply touched by this. And he hung the Great Seal.

in the library of the American Embassy in Moscow, where all the most secret meetings were held. Not for seven years was it realized that Stalin had placed a bug inside that great seal and every single conversation had been listened into. And I just thought that sort of sums up the malevolent cynicism of Joseph Stalin.

Wow. What a force, albeit a very evil one. Charles, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much. I'm going to ask you about the million European slaves in North Africa over on our substack. And that was a great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you for listening to The Winston Marshall Show with the phenomenal Giles Milton.

If you head over to winstonmarshall.co.uk, now you'll enjoy an extended conversation where Jars and I explore one of his other books, White Gold, the history of white European slaves in Africa, a long forgotten history. but one that used to be common knowledge in the West. That's all at winstonmarshall.co.uk, where you'll also enjoy ad-free viewing and listening as well as exclusive content. But... Until next time, be well.