Q&A: Author Robert Service

[Music] this week on Q&A Our Guest is biographer Robert service in the last 10 years he's written about the lives and influences of lenen Stalin and his latest [Music] trosky Robert service Harvard has published three of your books stop Lennon and trosky 1876 pages when did you get interested first time in this and why I got interested in this um I suppose in the late 60s when I was a student um mainly because it was being talked about by all my friends at the time I was doing languages in literature Russian literature ancient Greek literature but it was part of the atmosphere of the times and it started to suck me in and suck me away from from literature where were you located at the time I was in England Cambridge and I loved Tolstoy DVI all the great Russian Classics I loved ancient Greek tragedy but somehow somehow the bug got me then that there were really big questions to answer about one these uh amazing inventions of the 20th century the one party State totalitarianism where did it come from how did it develop uh what were its strengths to give it endurance and what were its weaknesses what were its Terrors that's how I came at it what years were you at the University of Cambridge in the late 60s and what were you studying I was studying Uh Russian literature and ancient Greek literature I started as a linguist so I didn't come in at this topic as a historian I I became a historian and if I read correctly uh the lenen book was 2000 by Harvard the Stalin book was 2004 and the try book was late last year 2009 that's right and one of the interests of doing all three of them is that that they're the gigantic figures at the start of the Soviet regime they're the Towering figures and they're all different they they they they have their different talents they have their different dangers but one of the one of the unifying uh themes of my work is that different as they are they shared more than they held apart from each other uh and that was communism really exist existing communism this extraordinary invention uh that the Russians U attained after 1917 Define communism according to what they thought it was supposed to be well communism as they saw it didn't have anything to do with sandals it didn't have anything to do with long hair it didn't have anything to do with uh smoking pot uh it did have something to do with Rebellion it did have something to do with ending exploitation and oppression around the world but it wasn't diffuse it was something that involved system political order economic regulation cultural control including censorship and travel restrictions uh you didn't even let poets out of the country if you thought that they might write a poem against your political uh system so this was um not the sort of Communism that was relaxed and open-ended and never could have held power anywhere never could have held power anywhere this was the sort of Communism that uh involved power involved an obsession with power uh involved a big objective which was to transfer transform all of society all of econom Economics all of politics and do it within a single generation and do it not just in one country but all around the world and this system was really existing communism it wasn't the pie in the sky communism of the mid 19th century it was connected to what Marx and Engles had developed in the middle of the 19th century but it took some of the ingredients of their doctrines and it it added on Russian fanaticism the Russian historical experience and practicality these were very very practical men Lenin Stalin and trosky can you define go to those three names again because we hear this all the time what is stalinism stalinism is a tighter form of leninism stalinism involves pervasive permanent State Terror on a scale that probably neither Lenin nor trosky would have endorsed stalinism is the most centralist politically and economically of all the variants of Communism what is leninism leninism is the idea that if you want a revolution you have to use violence there has to be an Insurrection you have to have a dictatorship you absolutely have to have state Terror to initiate the movement towards something gentler in the future now the difference between the two men was that Stalin didn't really see that Terror would ever ceased to be necessary in a sense he was right because men and women will always grow up with inconvenient ideas inconvenient ambitions so what do you do about them you maintain the dictatorship what is atrist atrist is someone who shares most of the ideas of Lenin but gives priority to the spreading of the revolution around the globe as a means of ameliorating the conditions in the original country of the Revolution Russia so trust I thought that there were indeed problems in Lenin's Russia in trotsky's Russia um fundamental problems to do with Russian historical backwardness which could be eradicated if only the revolution could be spread to Germany France Britain and America now to my mind this was um light-headed thinking the problems that existed in trotsky's variant of Communism were not specific to Russia there are problems if you set up a dictatorship if you use State Terror that are going to arise in any country you could do it in Belgium you could do it in South Africa you could do it in Peru you'd still get the same result small thing is there such a thing as a trosky I versus a trotskyist that's a really good question followers of trosky hate being called trotskyite it's a it's a way of teasing them actually in my book I call them trotskyists which is what they're comfortable with it's it's ridiculous because they like the Republicans in this country calling a Democrat the Democrat Party versus a Democratic party it's a it's a is it just an irritant it's a it's a cultural irritant no more if if you really want to get them wound up you call them trotskyites Stalin called the trotskyists trotskyites all right if you go to Moscow today go to Red Square the linen tomb is still there for people who want to go look at him he's there something's there why is it there still to this day and where is Stalin buried and where is trosky buried Lenin's still in the Tomb because the postcommunist government led by Barce yelton wanted to get him out of the Tomb and bury him uh but bowed to popular opinion Lenin always comes out rather well in popular opinion surveys because he he reassembled the lands he brought the old Russian Empire back together after 1917 Russia was disintegrating so he's remembered as somebody who um was tough uh severe even uh but did the job of keeping Russia together and all Russian children in the 1920s 30s and 40s were taught to look on Uncle Lenin as a as a family friend so that's very very deeply ingrained so it would so Bice yelton uh didn't dare ultimately to get him out of the Tomb Trotsky is buried in kakan outside the center of Mexico City uh his CET um is under a plinth in the Villa where he was assassinated 70 years ago um next month what about Stalin Stalin is someone who died in 1953 probably peacefully it was probably benign medical neglect that killed him off where is he buried he was um incinerated and his Ashes Remain below the Kremlin wall so he went into disgrace in the late 1950s after his death the Soviet leaders didn't quite know what to do with his remains um so they hit on this device of of moving him out of the uh Lenin Stalin melum uh incinerating him uh and and just putting his ashes below the Kremlin wall want to put on the screen a chart what we made up based on your books so that great we could get some idea of the the time period um you can see on the screen at the top are the years 1870 and 10e increments all the way up to 1950 50 and then you have Lennon who was born in 1870 right below that trosky born in 1879 and below that stal 1878 cross you go to the 1917 period there where lenon was 47 trosky 38 Stalin 39 and then you can see on the chart that lenon died at age 53 in 1940 trosky died at age 60 in uh well actually uh my eyes were deceiving me lenon was 1924 trosky was 1940 and then Stalin was 1953 at age 74 let's talk about those the deaths of those three men what were the circumstances around Lenin where did he die and what caused it well Lenin had very severe chronic health problems in fact to some extent his revolutionary impatience came from his presentiments that he might die young he said all revolutionary leaders died young so he um had problems with his heart he may have had syphilis uh he certainly had very very um uh terrible problems with his health more or less as soon as he took power and he went off for periods of convalescence where in in a sanatorium actually uh south of Moscow and from from 1922 onwards for the last two years of his life he he he was a um he uh could barely talk uh and he wrote a testament in which he called for the removal from uh posts of responsibility of Joseph Stalin and he predicted the possibility of a conflict between two potential successors one was Stalin and one was trosky and he had objections to both of them but ultimately he had the biggest objection to Joseph Stalin in those years when he was sick the 1922 to 1924 what was his role in the Soviet Union and what was going on in the world well in the early 1920s uh the Soviet Union was in a bad way it had um come through a Civil War the country was exhausted the economy was ruined and in order to restore the situation Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy and he also opened doors to trade uh with the west and this was awfully unpopular with his party comrades this seemed to them a betrayal of the ideology of Communism but Lenin together with Stalin together with trosy insisted that this sort of temporary compromise was essential for the survival of the regime how did they relate though at that time Lennon Stalin trosky where were they in 1922 well um Stalin was the General Secretary of the party which was thought to be a mainly administrative and not a political post but if you've got a onep party State and the party is doing the governing it's not an administrative job to be the administrative head of the party you're bound to have have your fingers in every single pie of politics and if that state also runs the economy you've got your fingers in the economic pies as well and if that state lays down The rules on censorship and on the diffusion of culture you're there too so Lenin didn't quite understand this didn't quite understand the architecture of the Communist building that he had put up and underestimated then the potential for um onean rule by Stalin uh that was to come to into existence in the early 1930s he tended to set Stalin against trosky because trosky seemed the more likely successor to practically everyone in the world trosy was a brilliant orator he was a he wrote like an angel I think anyone who reads his autobiography can't fail to be impressed by the first half of that autobiography it's he's a master of Russian Pros style how did those three men relate though in that 1922 period in other words did they were they in the same office were they all in the Kremlin did they all have jobs Lenin was in the sanatorium from 1922 onwards and he was issuing his General guidelines for policy Stalin was carrying them out increasingly he was carrying them out to his own wishes rather than to the desires of Lenin and although Lenin suspected trosky thought him very very vain thought him awfully arrogant thought him lacking in judgment he turned to trosky as a way of reigning back Stalin uh he he didn't particularly like trosky but but Lenin was a great user of people he knew how to use people he was clubbable he knew how to Pat people on the shoulder and make them feel good about themselves and um he knew that he could get through to trosky and use him against Stalin on page 473 of your book on Lenin you have what is a letter uh to Stalin from Lenin I want to read it and ask you what's the story behind this this is Lennon to Stalin and I suspect it was near the end uh or in the last couple years you had the uncouthness to summon my wife to the telephone and swear at her although she has even given you her agreement to forget what was said nevertheless this fact has become known through her to Zenovia zenov and CF Comm you you're really good not really I this is line it again I do not intend to forget so easily what has been done against me and it goes without saying that I consider that something done against my wife to be something also done against me therefore I ask you to consider whether you agree to take back what you said and apologize or prefer to break relations between us what brought that on when L was in the sanatorium in 1922 and 1923 he was making himself ill by his attempts to get re-involved in politics and the doctors told him and the political leadership agreed with him with them that he ought to ease out of politics but Lenin's wife knew that politics were the air that Lenin breathed without politics he was nothing and so she fed him information which allowed him to interfere in politics and the man who was in charge of the medical regime of Lenin was none other than Stalin and when Stalin found out that Lenin's wife was doing this he used all the UNC methods all of the obscene language of which um he was the master now Lenin was um a communist revolutionary but in his private life in his private habits he was a middleclass Victorian and you didn't use foul language you didn't smoke in the house actually in some ways he was anti Victorian because they all smoked in the house in those days this sort of uncouth Behavior was completely unacceptable to Lenin added to which Stalin was giving him a hard time politically uh and Stalin was um um getting more and more boisterous so Lenin went for him Lenin went for him because he'd always thought of Stalin as an errand boy as a political errand boy and it was turning out that he was another Lenin by the way just on a simple thing of height how tall was Len and how tall was stal how tall was try uh uh Lenin and Stalin were about the same uh height about five six trosy was a little bit uh taller none of them were giants um the man who had the the greatest um physical presence undoubtedly was trosky if you look at the pictures in my book I I collected some fantastic pictures from the Hoover Institution archives in California about a fifth of what's left in the world from trosky is out in California it's not it's it's not in Moscow it's out in California you can see from these pictures that he he had an almost um uh movie matina star um physical presence he could talk uh theind legs off a donkey and he didn't need notes uh the most he ever did with his um preparation for speeches was to have a little a tiny little Aid Memoir in his hand you know those speeches that um we read from 1917 they don't come from the Bureau of trosky they come from the reporters who were writing down the notes uh longhand trosky himself when he wrote his Memoirs had to go back to the notes of the newspaper reports of his speeches because he only had little odds and ends let's go back back to our chart uh again we we divide everything up around the year 1917 lennin was 47 he didn't last much longer than that he only lasted about six years yeah um what was the importance of 1917 what happened oh 1917 was one of the turning points in modern world history uh a Communist Party came to power it left the cafes it left the libraries and it came to power and it took power in a big country at a time of War how big was the country then and was it called the Soviet Union no it was the former Russian Empire and it covered one sixth of the world's Earth surface and the importance of the event was firstly that it withdrew Russia from the first world war allowing the Germans to concentrate their forces on the Western Front against the British the French and the Americans but even more importantly it brought into existence a totally new way of running Society it brought into existence a one-party system that depended on dictatorship and on state Terror it brought into existence a system of rule that penetrated not only politics but the whole of the economy and the whole of culture and all of social life it uh removed Civic freedoms from anyone associated with the old days with the old propertied Elites anybody who'd been middle class was deprived of the vote did that include Ukraine and the stands you know the Tajikistan and K Kazakhstan and all that kirstan and also um Georgia and those states where they all included then in the governing unit when the Civil War happened in 1918 through to the early 1920s first the Communists took over Russia then they took over Ukraine again uh until the second world war they didn't take over Estonia lvia and Lithuania but they did take over the trans Caucasus Georgia aaban Armenia and they did take back Central Asia and they took over the whole of Siberia so essentially the Russian Empire was reconstituted and Lenin was born where he was born in the vulgar region in a place called simis in Russia in Russia and and Stalin was born where in Georgia and he was a Georgian what's the difference the the difference is um the difference between let's say um an Englishman and an Albanian um the Georgians were a small are a small nation to the south of the Caucasus mountain range they speak an entirely different language from the Russians and this was one of the reasons why the other communist leaders rather look down on Stalin because Russian wasn't his first language and he was always making slight uh mistakes and he had a heavy accent and trosky was born where trosky was born in the south of what we would Now call Ukraine to a very wealthy uh farming family uh he tended to play down a lot of aspects of his early life he tended to uh draw a veil over the enormous Commercial Success that his extraordinary uh father had in building up this this Farm in the south of the country uh his father was Jewish that wasn't the most convenient National or religious group to belong to in the Russian Empire trotsky's father triumphed over all of uh the the obstacles in his path and he built up a huge farm and try's original name was trotsky's original name was brunin and uh he changed it like all the revolutionaries did you had to have a a pseudonym to avoid the police let's go back to the Lenin death you started this in 1922 in a sanitarium and what were the circumstances of his death and what happened right afterwards well if we go back to the period when Lenin was dying he tried to set down guidelines for how the communist state would operate when he uh departed and he knew he was dying and he knew not only that his physique was going but also his brain was going and Lenin didn't really know what would be done with him when he died what was done with him was that he became the object of a quasi religious cult This was um a political convenience uh Lenin was thought of by The Peasants as their friend in fact he'd done a lot of damage to the peasant economy but the peasants didn't see it that way they saw it as being Lenin having given them the land so that he was a rallying point for a substitute religion because let's let's remind ourselves the Communists didn't just want to change the practical way that Society was run it wanted to change the belief system and so it wanted to get rid of religion entirely and it found that this couldn't be done without substituting it um sub substituting something else for it and so he became the object of a quazi religious cult and you you know from then onwards from 1924 when he died onwards uh it was completely impossible for any Soviet leader willingly to criticize any aspect whatever of Lenin's life and career who was with him when he died when he died his wife was out there at the sanatorium with him and the last Soviet leader to see him was Nikolai bukharin one of the other contenders for the political um succession someone who eventually like most of the rest was killed by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s let's go back to our chart again um we can see where Mr Lennon was aged 53 when he died and the next one to die on the list is trosky there's that period there between 1924 and 1940 when he died that's about 16 years what happened to trosky well as soon as Lenin died and even before Lenin died a battle took place for the succession and it was a battle of personality but also a battle of ideas and a battle over policy uh Stalin pre preferring to concentrate on building communism in a single country trosky wanting to expand communism to foreign countri R and that battle went on until trotsky's comprehensive political defeat in 1927 and his deportation from the country in 1929 and this was regarded uh by Stalin as a mistake he shouldn't have let him out of the country he regretted letting him out of the country because from abroad from 1929 first in Turkey then in parts of Europe and eventually in Mexico trosky tried to run an ideological campaign against Stalin from abroad from Exile how didd he do it he did it by writing furiously he uh he got onto the American newspapers the European newspapers he made appeals in the Press uh he he was a a wonderful propagandist um really he was happier with a pen than with any other instrument of daily life let's look at some video um found this on YouTube not sure the origin of it but it'll allow people to see what he looked like and he reads in English yes let's it's not very long let's watch it St stal against me is built upon false Confessions extorted by mod inquisitorial methods in the interest of the ruling cre there are no crime in history more terrible in intention in ex execution than the mosow trials of Z and of P his trials develop not from communism not from socialism but from stalinism that is from the irresponsible despotism of the bureaucracy over the people what is now my principal task to reveal the truth to show and to demonstrate that the true criminals hide in Under the Clock of the accusers what are you seeing there I'm seeing a man who thought he spoke English better than he really did if he'd been speaking in French especially if he'd been speaking in German you'd have seen greater fluency I mean he comes across to me there as a bit like a a mad scientist of the 1950s that's in Mexico when when did he go how did he get to Mexico and why eventually uh the Turks didn't want him uh the French didn't want him uh the Scandinavians didn't want him and why not why not because uh Stalin's USSR put pressure on them uh because he was a subversive the Germans wouldn't have him at all because he wanted to create a dictatorship of the proletariat in Germany now what country in the world would say yes you come in Be Our Guest so he was always a very uncomfortable person to have in the country and revolutionary Mexico was the only Haven for him by the end of the 1930s and very regretfully that's where he went how many years was he in Mexico he was in Mexico for three years uh before Stalin's political police caught up with him what was what were the circumstances of his death an assassin a trained assassin Ramon mercader was sent out from Moscow with a team uh he was told to seduce one of the many young women who worked as secretarial assistance for Trotsky he did this very effectively he inv vagled his way into the Villa on a regular basis in kakan in Mexico City and one day one um Sunny August 1940 afternoon he turned up in a Macintosh claiming that he'd heard that it was going to rain Macintosh being a a trench coat a a trench coat a raincoat yeah and in that raincoat he had a huge dagger and also the end of an ice ax so he had two possibilities in mind both in his coat both in his coat and no one noticed that in fact um This was um an odd way of arriving on a day that was as sunny as it was describe the Villa The Villa was like a fortress by then uh an American trist had had installed an electric a very Advanced electrical alarm system there were guard posts outside the villa and there were raised guards posts uh at the corners of the Villa but inside the compound and it was really like a fortress and it's just the same today if you go there beautiful garden rabbit hutches uh trosy was very practical kept rabbits very cheap to to to to feed all the trotus who flocked to uh sit at his table and sit at his feet um kept chickens um grew cactuses grew flowers you know he was an Old Farm Boy as well he liked that sort of uh aspect of of Life wife with him wife with him how many years his wife had been with him since the first years of the 20th century longsuffering wife a wife who idolized him who very rarely contradicted him um uh really a saint but in those three years he had a affair with a figure that a lot of Americans know he indeed had an affair with Freda Carlo and that practically destroyed the marriage she was married to Diego Rivera the painter indeed and it was Diego Rivera the painter and Freda Carlo who had invited Trotsky to seek refuge in kakan at their house initially so uh right towards the end of his life Trotsky um behaved very badly to Natalia his wife uh but she's stuck at it she had chosen the life of being married to one of the greatest revolutionaries of uh modern times and she she didn't have regrets in 1940 what did people including Americans think if they were trus and there have some been some major figures in American politics that have considered themselves a nation trus what were they getting out of him there weren't very many trus in the world in the 1930s uh most of those who existed um were eliminated by Adolf Hitler in Germany there were some hundreds of them in France a few dozens in the United Kingdom and some hundreds in the United States the ones in the United States were the most Troublesome Trot gists of the lot because they couldn't stomach or lots of them couldn't stomach trotsky's support for Stalin's geostrategic policies at the beginning of the second world war a lot of them couldn't see why Trotsky um condoned Stalin's invasion of Finland uh a lot of them just simply couldn't see why trosky recommended that no American Soldier should fight on the Allied side in the second world war so there were tremendous battles between these young American trotskyists and trosky himself and he treated them with disdain with total disrespect and that side of trosky came out that his followers to this day try to draw a curtain across because it's an embarrassment to him ultimately you see Trotsky believed in the fundamentals of leninism in the one party state in the one ideology state in the state that seeks its own interests at the expense of all the other interests of humanitarianism uh in the world it's an inflexible way of thinking trosky was a very flexible thinker for a communist leader in the middle of the 20th century but what I'm trying to say in my book is that's not being very flexible at all essentially there was far more that pulled Lenin Stalin and trosky together than tug them apart 1940 August Stalin sends his henchmen in to kill him yeah he comes to the Villa he's got the trench coat on he's got the ice ax in his pocket what's he do he comes in for a discussion uh about politics with trosky he's written a draft article which is a pretty pathetic article and trosky in the way that he had he he was a teacher uh had agreed to give a a brief um uh tutorial to Ramon mercader about this draft and as trosky is peering over the draft meair gets to his feet and they're talking and merad takes a snap decision he'll use the ice ax some sometimes it's translated as ice pick but an ice pick is is something that a cocktail waiter uses this was a huge ice axe yeah we've got a photograph that people can see and he buried it in the back of the head of Leon trosy and it didn't kill him but it mortally wounded him and he struggled for Life what happened right away after he hit him I mean did did he was he unconscious he he he he wasn't unconscious he was riding uh in agony he was screaming the guards came in the trotus guards came in they they they laid hold of uh the Assassin the police turned up trosky was under constant surveillance by the Mexican police the US Consulate was keeping an eye on him too uh journalists were all all all over him all of the time in Mexico uh City so um mercader is is taken into captivity he denies his real identity he denies having anything to do with the Soviet Union he's put on trial and he's kept in prison for decades always denying that he had any connection with Joseph Stalin always saying in fact that he was a disappointed follower of Leon trosy what happened to him though once he got out of jail and didn't he get out of jail in 60 yeah and he uh went back to the Soviet Union did he ever fess up that he was a Stalin he did he he was given a rank in the KGB uh he was awarded prizes and medals but he couldn't stand the Soviet Union he just couldn't stand living there this was not the place that it had been built up to be in his imagination uh and and he moved to Cuba what did Stalin think he accomplished by taking trky out you have to you have to say I think that far too many resources were put to the extermination of the life of this one single individual a man who had at most a few thousand followers in the world whose message barely ever got through to the USSR in the late 1930s um trosy was politically dead before he was physically dead Stalin was a bit of an obsessive and uh if you wanted to get rid of a problem you physically exterminated the manifestation of the problem how long did he live by the way and what was the funeral like the funeral was a great Mexican state occasion the the the the thoroughfares of central Mexico uh were cleared crowds turned out to see the the Hearst going through um uh the city uh people turned out who were Catholics for the death of a militantly atheist revolutionary leader this is one of the um aspects of trotsky's life that one has to take account of that what people thought trosky to have been was not what he actually had been there's a romanticization of trosky my book is the I'm not trying to be be boastful I'm just stating it as a fact that most people who have written about trosky uh have fallen in love with him they either been trotskyists or are trotskyists or their ex trotskyists who haven't really um got trosky out of their head so I've tried to read every single thing he wrote I've tried to read the drafts of everything that he wrote and the drafts of his autobiography in the Hoover institution archives are uh amazingly helpful do you speak or read Russian yes you can't do this without um I'm afraid you can't do this with that and that's another problem with the a lot of the trosky biographies that they're written by people who don't read The Originals and and the translation of trotsky's works is not always done in an accomplished fashion Hoover is on the campus of Stanford how did they get the trosy autobiography and had it ever been published try's autobiography was published um they have the actual script but they have the script I have to tell you Brian that this is the most amazing thing to handle he had a very peculiar way of writing eccentric way of writing he dictated during the day lots of letter sized um uh pieces of paper and then at night when the secretary rode home to Istanbul because he was exiled on an island off the Turkish Mainland he physically stuck the p ages into a big long scroll and in these Hoover institution archive um archives they have each chapter rolled up into a scroll in other words when he edited what he' dictated in the in the morning he liked to see the Run of it he had an aesthetic sense did you read the original yeah you they allowed you to sit there and roll it out and read it they did um they have why ly in my view introduce restrictions on on what you can do now to these these extraordinary artifacts do you have any idea how many people have read this I think I'm the only one who's read the drafts of the autobiography it was a thrill it was a magical experience for a for a wouldbe historian when when did you do it uh two or three years ago and how much time did it take you to do it well thankfully he wrote in a very legible hand I've I've looked at um the manuscripts of the great dictators in the Soviet Union Lenin didn't write awfully legely Stalin wrote legibly but you have to work at it but trosky was a bit of an artist and he wrote very very clearly so you C you can read it really really quite easily let's go back to our chart two down one to go um you can see on the list there Lennon dead at 53 1924 trosky dead at ag60 in 1940 but all through this process Lennon's still alive and he lasts until he's 74 years old and he lasts until 1953 yeah Stalin you mean not Lenin yes I'm sorry Stalin MH is he from Lennon's death on until he dies is he in charge of Russia during that whole time and how would you capsulize what it was like I know we we've talked here about the great Terror in 3738 but just give us a capitalization of what you think his time was like in in the Soviet Union St Stalin um introduced uh stability to the USSR it was a sort of stability of chaos because people lived in a whirlwind of experience the Farms were collect I ized all of industry was taken into uh State ownership the cultural system was regimented uh the whole of society was militarized uh the USSR became a a great power even before it entered the uh Second World War and the Apex of this political system was that single figure Joseph Stalin and he was more dominant over that political system than even Lenin had been been in Soviet Russia because he had stabilized that system he had made it possible for that system to endure people started to wear uniforms in jobs where uniforms hadn't existed before it was a very militarized Society so if you work for the foreign Ministry you had to wear a uniform um you you were you were a cog in the Machinery of state and the state engulfed Society now there was a lot of that going on in Lenin's Soviet Russia but it reached its peak in the Stalin years in the 1930s and 1940s how many people did he kill we don't really know for sure but um it's Millions it's Millions who disappeared into the gag do you agree with the 50 million figure I I don't think anybody knows and I'll tell you why I'm haing and avoiding an answer to an exact number there are lots of ways of killing people you can put them up against a wall and shoot them you can put them into the goolag and starve them but you can also forcibly resettle them in inhospitable regions of the country you can ruin the Agriculture and deprive even the free citizenry of all of the nutrition uh that they need you can sew mangle your foreign policy as to do a deal with Adolf Hitler and Ill prepare your country for war in 1941 so that you have to evacuate territory where uh the Germans then uh enter and kill even more people in in this respect then the number could be even higher than the one that you just mentioned let's go to the end of his life Lenin buried there in the Tomb in red Square Stalin's ashes there trosky in Mexico um but go to the end of his what was the end of Stalin's life like Stalin was exhausted by his involvement in the second world war he was he was an old man before he was old uh he had to ration his interventions in politics one of the reasons he was so deliberately terrifying to his his associates was that he couldn't afford to keep intervening on a daily basis with the intensity that he had done in the 1930s and 1940s so he took lots of holidays down in the south of the country in the South Caucasus in abasia I've been around these daters they're like medieval fortresses one thinks of wooden Huts for duchas for for Russian retreats in the summer these were gigantic fortresses and he he got on the telephone to his subordinates and he concentrated on the guidelines of policy what was his health like his health was terrible and when a doctor a very brave doctor in the early 1950s said to him a man called vinogradov you must ease off uh you're going to kill yourself if you go at this pace which was only half pace uh he had the doctor arrested this was a state secret the declining physical health of Joseph Stalin that Joseph Stalin did not intend anyone to learn vagr had made a um a medical judgment that nearly cost him his life when was it obvious he was not going to live very long by the early 1950s when the party Congress the 19th party congress met for the first time after the second world war in 1952 for the very first time it was not Stalin who made the big speech it was one of his associates where was he uh his uh place was on the platform alongside gorgi malanu his anointed uh successor but his his health was so poor um his Frailty was so obvious that he didn't want to expose himself in the way that would be uh involved if he gave a really big long speech so everyone knew there was something wrong with Stalin who saw him even just sitting on the podium so when did he you what was it like at the very end at the very end most people who were alive in 1953 had been brought up most people were young after all lots of people had died in the 1930s or died in the second world war most people in their 20s or 30s or younger had known no other ruler but Joseph Stalin and they had been taught to rever him so when the day of the funeral came there was a huge press of people pushing towards red square and a lot of them got trampled to death in the rush so even in death Joseph Stalin for once inadvertently was a killer well was the story though around his death where I mean he I I remember reading in your book that he wouldn't sleep in places that uh he was expected to because he was afraid somebody find him and kill him but what were the the last couple of weeks what was going on well uh you're you're right he he was very suspicious and if you go around these dates these fortresses really uh you can see how many beds he had upstairs and downstairs and they're they're quite modest he wasn't a man who wanted um a luxurious lifestyle uh he he had his guards who he spoke spoke to who had a a regime of supervision and his health started breaking up and there is more than a suspicion that the rest of the political leadership decided that he was so dangerous to them all personally that they wouldn't rush to get the doctors out to see him and there's a good reason to think I think that the secret police Specialists especially laventi barrier who was under threat from Stalin at the time decided that benign medical neglect would be the key to the personal survival of burier and his successors so I don't think he was actually killed but I don't think his natural death was unassisted but there was a at that very last moment he was in a bedroom somewhere and they were afraid to go in and look at him they were afraid to go in and and look at him but I think they made the excuse that they were afraid to go in and look at him because they made it very awkward for the doctors and for the guards to go in either uh he was a dangerous man at the very end he was turning on practically all of his Close Associates what would anyone do in those circumstances um whose death sentence do you prefer that of the the uh dictator or that of yourselves we have to wind this up but in your book on uh trosky at the very end you write the Bolsheviks were Universal militants they aimed to turn the world up side down and build a revolutionary Society culture economy and politics in their own way they too were fervent Believers and none more so than trosky as he once said They wish to build a paradise on Earth we only have a minute what happened no Paradise there certainly was no Paradise uh their fanaticism was tied to a ruthlessness that blinded them to the dangers of using the methods of of building that paradise what sort of paradise was it where the paradise always had to have walls a paradise is somewhere where anyone would want to live voluntarily that was not the case in the old USSR of Lenin Stalin and Leon trosky last question what's next for Robert service I'm doing two uh big books I'm doing one on Russia and the West in the Russian Revolution and I'm going to do a second on the Soviet Union and the West at the end of the Cold War and I think there are lots of big questions to be asked about the international Dimensions that I haven't done enough about as we said the three books we've been talking about today are the 2000 release of the book Lenin 561 pages the 2004 release of the book Stalin 715 pages and just recently the 2009 release of trosky 600 Pages all published by Harvard bellnet thank you very much for joining us thanks for having [Music] me for DV copy of this program call 877662 7726 for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at q&a. org Q&A programs are also available as C-SPAN [Music] podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 46,191

Keywords: C-SPAN, cspan, q&a, service, lamb, trotsky, russian, revolution

Id: 1DGqK3VUNZI

Length: 58min 22sec (3502 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2010