400. Stalin: A Poisonous Legacy (Part 6)

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1:275. The Unthinkable Do The Impossible You're gonna become so dangerous that the predators can't help but let you go. We're gonna get out of here. We'll fall. We're at PD 13 and theaters October 16th get tickets now. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney Plus. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney Plus. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I'm alive this game. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu now streaming on Disney Plus. We're at PD 13. Vote. Device. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnond.

2:31And me, William Durimple. We've watched a bullied, pock-marked boy become a bank robber, then a bureaucrat, then the master of a sixth of the earth. We've counted the dead in the terror and the famine and the war in the millions. And we have asked all the way through this a question that is not really about the past at all, but about the present. Why is a man in the Kremlin 70 years after Stalin died, so determined to put him back on the plinth? This isn't just a series about a dead dictator. It's about a country that really can't decide whether the man of steel is a monster or a founding father. In May 2025, a carving of Stalin went back up in the Moscow metro station. It's a replica of one of his successes, torn down years ago. And that image is where we began the whole series. Today, we're really trying to understand the man who wanted to put it back up. And how far he is actually modeling himself on the man of steel. And to do that, we've got to someone who's actually sat in the room with Vladimir Putin,

3:36read him for a living and thought as hard as anyone about what actually drives him. Our guest is Fiona Hill. She grew up the daughter of a coal miner in County Durham. She learned Russian. She turned herself into one of the sharpest readers of the Kremlin in the world. She was a national intelligence officer on Russia. Then the most senior Russia advisor on the American National Security Council. And she wrote with Clifford Gaddi, the book many people reach for first when they want to understand this president. It's called Mr. Putin operative in the Kremlin. Fiona, welcome to Empire. In your long list of accolades, I've got to mention, you are now also Chancellor Durham. So you get to wear a fancy hat and do fancy things. I do indeed. No, thank you so much for having me here. It's great to be here with you. First of all, I mean, are we making too much of this? And when you read the Kremlin, do you see that there is this resurgence of Stalin? I do. And you're not reading too much into it. I mean, what is interesting about this is that Putin has tried on the garb on the image of many other Russian, Soviet, you know,

4:39period leaders for size. And I guess Stalin is the latest, the latest of the Emperor's new clothes. If we look back to early periods, he's gone through Zara's ministers, like Stolepin, who at one point was a prime minister of the Russian Empire under Zara Nicholas II. So before the Russian Revolution, he was the great reformer. This was an early phase of Putin's presidency. Stolepin, rather unfortunately, met his demise within assassination in the Kiev Opera House, just before the Revolution. So, you know, you can imagine that his end was not really the one that Putin was wanting to associate with himself with. Been at various points, he's extolled the virtues of the greats, Catherine the great, Peter the great, Alexander the great, who was, again, another reformer who emancipated the Serfs. And I think it's very interesting very telling that he's gone back to Stalin, who wasn't somebody who is in that

5:40original pantheon, as he has become more and more embroiled in the war in Ukraine because of course Stalin's association for many people and obviously in this case for Putin is with victory. He was the winner in World War II, the great Fatherland war, which Putin has tried to make linkages with in terms of the war Ukraine. The thing is, though, the thing I find weird about all of this is that there is not a family that hasn't been touched either by the famine, the terror, the gulags. How is this sort of national amnesia working, where people find it okay? Or are you getting the idea that actually people are chafing under these big statues and you know this sort of resurgence of Stalin's name? Okay, I think every society suffers from historical amnesia. And Putin at one point in one of the many meetings that I was present in where he was speaking was asked a question by a British journalist about Lenin, for example, why Lenin had never been removed from the Mausoleum on Red Square. And Putin immediately shot back and

6:44said to this British journalist, well, hang on, you're from the United Kingdom aren't you? What about Cromwell? Oliver Cromwell. Oliver Cromwell's statue is still outside of the houses of parliament said Putin. It's quite a sharp response. It was a very sharp response and I was like, gosh, that's kind of clever. Did he kind of do this a little bit of research on this? In advance, and he said, who was the worst butcher? Lenin or Cromwell? That's a good question and actually, you know, it'd be probably hard to respond to that, wouldn't it? That's the Irish. They might come with a surprising answer. Yeah, exactly. And I think that Stalin for Putin falls into that category. It sees part of useful history, a very useful history. A lot of people have forgotten, or maybe sometimes didn't know, given their age, and he Putin's already been in power for 25 years. And the people who have memories of Stalin going back to the 1940s and 1950s are either very old or they're all dead. And, you know, those stories have not necessarily been passed down in recent time. So I think that Putin can use Stalin as an iconic figure and is more confident that he can

7:47reshape the narrative about Stalin, the image of Stalin that he's trying to use just as all of a Cromwell, as he rightly said, still stands outside of the houses of parliament. Seen as the father of parliament rather than the butcher of where do we begin? Ireland, Scotland, you know, lots of England and the person who decapitated a king. What do you think also about this remark that he says that the excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the means of attacking the Soviet Union in Russia. Do you think that's a genuine they felt feeling from him? No, that's a sentiment that he's expressing as a justification, you know, for what he's actually doing. I mean, it's a classic going right back at your accuser, just like this amazing in exchange that he's had with this British journalist and basically putting on to everybody else, well, look, you would of course criticize Stalin because he's a symbol of the greatness of the Soviet Union in the peak of its power, or at least the peak of its perceived power in the being one of the victors of World War II, which of course established the United States as a global power. And he's using that, as I said,

8:51just very astutely one might say, but also pretty cynically, as a way of pushing back anybody who might be protesting about Stalin's restoration. There's pushing back and then there's also reprogramming. I was really interested in this rewriting of the one compulsory history textbook that every child in Russia has to read. This is August 2023, and it was written by Putin's close ally, Vladimir Medinsky. Now, among the things that it says is, you know, the terror is pretty much a footnote. Stalin, you described, we did this in the first episode in the series, a pragmatic manager. Now, you know, what do you make of sort of reprogramming history in the minds of young people? And what do you see as the effect that's having in the last three years? Well, look, this is something that so many states indulge in. I mean, I'm sitting talking to you in Washington, DC, where, you know, we've just gone through a bizarre celebration in terms of some of the things that happened here in Washington

9:55itself in the capital of the 250th anniversary of the United States and of the Declaration of Independence. And there was a lot of reprogramming going on, including a fight on the White House lawn of a really bizarre version of a state fair and all kinds of reprogramming, repositioning of previous United States presidents who wouldn't have been seen in the same light as they are now from the vantage point of the president, President Trump. This is all useful history. And it's what you make use of it. And as I've said already, Putin has reprogrammed Piotr Stilipin, his reprogrammed Catherine the Great, his reprogrammed Peter the Great, and Stalin, there's just a lot to reprogram, obviously given the extent of the crimes of Stalin that we learned in 1956 and onwards after Khrushchev's famous secret speech. But it's also that he's refitted and reprogrammed from a time of war because the whole idea of Putin is that Russia is facing down just as a Soviet union,

11:03was facing down the entirety of NATO Western forces once again, like Napoleon or like Nazi Germany before them, trying to bring Russia, the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire down to its knees. So it's I think this is just a classic trope. It's the kind of thing that we see in history over and over again. If you look actually, what Russian imperial history, you know, as you've talked about, many time in various episodes, the episodes and other empires, this is the kind of thing that we often see when a system is somewhat in trouble or is wanting to convey something different to its citizenry. Under the Tsars and Nicholas II, for example, they did something similar, they went back into the grab bag of former imperial Russian history and tried to give themselves a kind of fresh look knowing that they were in big trouble in the run up to the revolution. It's not just Stalin that Putin has taken on board, it's also the Russian Orthodox Church and Stalin, the Russian

12:04Orthodox Church, went exactly on particularly friendly terms given Stalin's background. I love those pictures of Putin diving into icy water without bishops or reviving him as he comes up. He's fully into all that sort of thing. He certainly is. It's just whatever is a good symbol of the state that he can use and something that exudes and transmits a sense of power. And when Putin was asked about the Orthodox Church, for example, he complained that the Bolsheviks had got rid of it because he said it was a very useful source of power for strengthening the state. So that's how he sees Stalin. And Stalin created a whole secular religion or religious cult in effect around himself and Putin is using that same religious cult or quasi-religious cult for himself. And the same is true in reverse, isn't it? That people who are memorializing his victims, indeed, this human rights organization memorial specifically gets closed down as anti-national somehow detracting

13:06from the state. I mean, that's exactly the case that yesterday's victims become today's threats to the system. The very people that you were trying to link arms with and that passed because that was part of the policy of that present is now no longer useful for you. I mean, for people like Yeltsin, before him, for Gorbachev, and actually initially for Putin himself who was actually even seen in the company of the head of memorial, Ludmilar Xeivnet, at various points, it was useful to commemorate and try to embrace the victims. He himself, I mean, his own family, their run-ins with Stalin. One of his grandparents, grandfathers, was a cook for Stalin and probably didn't have the best experience in that context either. And he wasn't really a great fan of the communist party. And there's no kind of early evidence that he was particularly pro-Styling, but this is what he needs for this moment. The thing is, it's so strange. It's a really odd

14:09tightrope he has to walk because, as I said earlier, there are a lot of people who were touched by this. They may have been cooks for Stalin or they may have been in a gulag thanks to Stalin or they may have staffed to death because of Stalin. And you do have Putin at times, sort of standing in front of the memorial in Moscow to the victims of the repressions, the wall of grief. There is this large edifice. And he did say there can be no justification for these crimes. So it is a, I mean, is this double thing? Is this sort of a well-earned, you know, all things to all people? I mean, I didn't know how to interpret that, along with the hands off Stalin, you hypocrite, you've got Cromwell. I think for Putin, all of these things are possible. He's the ultimate synthesis or synthesizer of Russian history, Soviet history, Soviet power. He himself tries to embody that kind of spirit of the Russian and Soviet states that have proceeded in Watts and all. He basically says that. I mean, it's very much in the spirit of Dostoevsky. They're going to

15:13think about the brothers Karamazov, the whole discussions that you can't have light without dark, you can't have light and shadow without each other. For Putin, he says, look, the great glories of Russia, they came with a cost. Some of those costs were unacceptable, but they had to be accepted. You know, if you take Stalin as the great wartime leader that it was, then you, you know, you have to just also act like the terrible things happen. Yeah, you can't have one without the other. You can't have the light without the dark. Now, all of us would say, come on a second, hang on. I mean, so this is outrageous. I mean, you yourself have spoken out against all of these millions of casualties. His own parents went through the siege of Leningrad and lost a child and his, every family, as you said, Anita was touched by Stalin one way or another, and not in a good way. Absolutely. Even the people of a closest to him suffered immensely. But look, we've also got a president in Putin in the here and now who in trying to re-expand the Russian Empire, do the same things that Stalin did, you know, as a result of World War II tech bacteriistry that

16:17had been lost by the Russian Empire at the end of World War One and extending out the extent of Soviet and Russian influence further than it had ever been in history. For Putin to try to do the same, we're already two million or more casualties in the war in Ukraine. I mean, that's not at all in terms of death, but certainly in terms of the people who have suffered greatly in being grievously injured. We've seen a president who hasn't really flinched at all, blinked with more than a thousand people a day dying on the battlefield. This is Russians, or being seriously injured on the battlefield for incremental territorial games. So, I mean, I guess one would say to Putin, if he was the journalist, well, you know, kind of, okay, you know, what about you and Stalin and Lenin and Cromwell and, you know, all the rest of it. He's, you know, who who is worse at the same time that the clock, the country with glory. In your book, Fiona, you take Putin apart into several different men wearing the same suit. You talk about the status, the history man, the survivalist, the outsider, the free

17:22marketer, all these things that are apparently contradictory, but which are this complex man. And the one which we're going to pause on now is the one that you gave, in a sense, the book titled to the case officer, because before he was any the rest of it, Putin was KGB. I remember once having a conversation with Victor Orban, and I said, what was your impression of Putin? And his answer was immediate. He's KGB. He's absolutely full KGB. And if you understand that, you can understand Putin, he said. And that's where the line back to Stalin is not a metaphor. It's an institution Lenin builds the checker in 1917. Stalin turns it into the machinery of the terror. It becomes the KGB. And when the Soviet Union falls, of course, it does not die, even though it becomes the FSB. It changes its name, but the institution remains much the same. And that was the service that Putin ran before he ran the country. And in many ways, it's the most durable institution in modern Russia. The secret

18:25police and the president came up through it. Do you think it's what defines him above all? I think it does define him, but not above all, because all of these are the facets of his personality, which Cliff Gadi, my co-author and I really try to get at it in terms of figuring out what drives him, really aggregated, perhaps, in that role. He's got all of these other elements in the way that he thinks. He doesn't just think like a case officer, the operative in the Kremlin, which was the subtitle of the book, after Mr. Putin, which is how he recruits people, how he manipulates people, how he gets people to do things that they really don't want to do, how he turns in people, maybe unwittingly or wittingly into assets in service of him and his interests in the Russian state. But he also kind of thinks about the Russian state in a very different way. There is that element of him, he's not like Trump, for example, or the sun-kying, or some of the leaders where they say the state is me, he sees himself as a servant of the state. He is very much rooted in an understanding of Russian imperial and Soviet history. And he frames himself in those stories

19:27as well. So it's not just he's trying to think about just narrow manipulation of people. He has this kind of sense of what Russia is and what he should be in that context. To understand what drives Putin, we need to go back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think, as well. Because we mentioned this already, Putin was a mid-ranking KGB officer, posted to Dresden first, then in communist East Germany. In fact, I have spoken to a journalist when he was very junior Putin. He used to do raids on cinemas where people were watching movies in the middle of the day when they should have been out working. And he was one of the people he remembers really acutely, sort of a very young Putin, turthing him out and threatening to arrest people because they weren't working, they were watching a movie. He then lives through the wall coming down, the crowds coming out, mobs gathering outside his own building where he was in orbit at a middle-evolking. And at that time, he tells the story of ringing a local Soviet military unit for protection and being told in effect that Moscow wasn't saying anything and that nobody could

20:32act without orders. There were no orders coming in, the men with the guns and simply stopped answering. And he watched in that state of being powerless, which I think you can probably read a lot into the way he is now. With that state of panic, would we say or just, you know, disgust that everything has collapsed in minutes? I think he was shocked by that because he had joined the institution of the KGB and the foreign service part of that intelligence service, thinking that this was really, as you know, will you suggest it, the apex of the whole system. He wanted to, if he was really going to be part of everything, be in the institution that really mattered, that in his view kept everything together and oversaw everything. And then the fact that all that just seemed to just disappear, like water into sand, I think he just couldn't quite believe it. And it gave him a shock. And as you said, I mean, in a lot of the autobiographical material where he talks to journalists and interviews, he said that whole idea that Moscow was silent, that Moscow suddenly had lost all

21:35of its power. And that it had ceded the stage, just gone off and disappeared, was perhaps the most astounding thing that he did ever experience up until that point in his life. And I think it does shape that whole idea of a restoration of putting things back again. And you know, when you see him in those very early stages of being, you know, he's the prime minister for a while, he's the acting president, and then he's the fallen president. His whole view is putting the state back, strengthening the state again. And putting at its service all the institutions that he possibly can, which would include the FSB, the successor to the KGB, the Orthodox Church, you know, anything else that he thinks would become a pillar, a fundament for a new foundation for a Russian state. And that's going to when he also starts reviving dead Zars and Zarena's, kind of the people who had presided over the Russian Empire when it was a major player in European affairs. We're going to take a break now,

22:38Fiona, but after the break, we can talk about some really very obvious parallels between Putin and Stalin. Those parallels run along the line of assassinations, said to studios, presents the most incredible survival story of the year. Well fall on October 16th to survive the unthinkable due the impossible. You're going to become so dangerous that the predators can't help but let you go. Well fall, waited PG-13 and theaters on October 16th, get tickets now. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney Plus. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney Plus. This is the way our only chance is to work together. I like this game. Always wear your seatbelt.

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24:46With Atio you can stop wrestling with Tunky Tools and focus on the bigger picture. Build smarter from day one. Try Atio for free at a double TIO.com-mpire. That's ati-o.com-mpire. Welcome back. We had earlier in this series a wonderful episode on the murder of Trotsky, the idea that Stalin hunts him down wherever he goes even as far away as Mexico, that the ice pick finally gets him in the back of the head. This idea that the state will get you if you step out of line. There is quite a line of corpses that have followed Trotsky since Putin came into power. Well, yeah, I mean you can look at the roll call. So let's remind ourselves. 2006 there was Alexander Litvinyenko, a former officer who had turned on the FSB and he dies in London.

25:47After his tea is laced with radioactive polonium and then you have a British public inquiry that concludes- That's imaginative ends these aren't they? Well, I mean they're just ghastly and they have collateral damage, you know, and it's a British public inquiry that concludes the killing was probably approved by Putin. The European Court of Human Rights later found Russia to be responsible. That is the same. We remember that. That's the same year that the journalist Anna Polikov-Skyer, ex-who exposed the war in Chechnya's is shot dead in the lift of her building, on Putin's birthday coincidentally. And then in 2015 you've got the opposition leader Boris Netsov, who's shot four times in the back on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin in 2018. You've got the Novichok case, which is used on the Skrapals and Salisbury, where an English woman dawns dies. And then you of course you have the most famous of all you have Alexina Valny, Putin's bravest domestic opponent. What reminds us what happened to him? He gets Novichok in his tea as he's about to board a plane and he actually survives that

26:51astonishingly through the plane landing and him ending up very quickly in the hospital. Nonetheless he goes home and he dies in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024, a month before an election that Putin was obviously always going to win. Now the Kremlin denies every one of these corpses. And the guys got anything to do with it. But Putin has ever been shy about the principle, but behind them, traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them. And it's always if he's proud of these murders. Is this Fiona sort of Stalin playbook, you know, the man who will go to the end of the Earth with an ice pick? This is the kind of modeling that's taking place now. And have we had it before with others? You know, the other presidents who went before Putin. Did they indulge in the same thing, but we just weren't looking or we weren't aware? Or it's just very new? Well, it's as old as time. Let's go back to antiquity and see plenty of examples of this,

27:52but in more contemporary modern Russia. Hannibal fleeing from the Romans and being caught in the Dead Sea. I mean, so many, I mean, you talk about these kinds of episodes on a regular basis. And I'm sure you could come up with a billion examples, you know, if you really kind of put your mind to it. And you know, we haven't even exhausted all of the examples. I mean, in Russia, a shocking number of people falling out of windows, some of them in hospital, and you know, on kind of strange physics. Some of them in India or in the United States. Some of them in India as well. I mean, lots of people are coming to bad ends across Europe and places like Spain, you know, for example, and you know, kind of elsewhere. In the United States, there have been some other kind of cases that have raised a lot of question marks. And of course, then there's Yves-Geney Piggord, you know, one point Putin's head of Putin's catering business who goes into much less savory work and is the head of the Wagner paramilitary group in charge of bot factories in St Petersburg and all kinds of manner of errands for Putin, who then engages in an

28:52insurgency during a really bleak period in the war on Ukraine, in which he gets into a big fight with the Ministry of Defence and starts a march on Moscow, ostensibly to get Putin's attention, but it looks, you know, remarkably like a march on Moscow as a precursor to a coup. All is forgiven for a while and then suddenly Piggordian comes out of the biggest window in the sky when something terrible happens to his plane with all of his friends on it at a time when he's been lulled into obviously a false sense of security and that's that. Were you surprised that he went back at all? I mean, because it seemed that he was destined to fall out of the sky the minute he went back to Russia. Well, he must have been, and this is, you know, what's interesting about Putin, is Putin does have incredible powers of persuasion and, you know, something which goes back to what you were talking about earlier, Willie, about, you know, one of the defining moments of his knowing how to work with people as the case officers, the operative, and he obviously persuades Piggordian, being after probably yelling at him a bit, so that, you know, all is fine, all is sort of forgiven, you know, in love and war. And Piggordian obviously believes that, although there was just no way

29:56that he would have got on along with his closest associates onto this plane. So, you know, Putin also makes it very clear that he will wait to the moment of his choosing to take someone else when they least expect it. And I'll be honest, you know, as somebody who's watching Putin and I don't really like to say this, I was almost in a weird way relieved when this happened because I thought my whole analysis of Putin was completely wrong. It was one of those, you know, patent-breaking events and I thought, my goodness, he's not going to take Piggordian out. This must tell us something else about, you know, the system, but then sure enough, you know, he's taken out of the picture. No one was surprised. Yeah, so nobody was surprised, but I guess Mr. Piggordian in the moment was, of a surprise because for Putin, this is what he does. And as you said, he has to make it part of the system that just like Stalin, there's no way you can go without him getting at you. And of course, I mean, the initial effort to kill Trotsky would try to shoot him, but the ice pick, you know, probably then just starts to kind of elevate then, you know, these really kind of

30:56nasty methods. I mean, Putin has also had Chechen war leaders taken out literally in the toilet, or at least in the field toilet with kind of a precursor of what would now be a drone attack, no doubt. Just all of these kinds of poisoning as well of one of the Chechen leaders through a letter, you know, kind of almost going back to sort of the medieval era. He likes a bit of poison, doesn't he? He's fond of a nice chemical end. Exactly. It's meant to be gruesome. That's the whole point of it. Isn't that, that phrase, poor Uncle Eiseid, there's ultra. I want everybody else to be afraid to see what could happen. Can we talk about the relationship with Georgia? Because we banged on a lot about Georgia and Stalin. And Gory is still to this day, so proud of Stalin. It's got this huge Stalin museum, great bronze Stalin's, you know, come back up. But in August 2008, Putin, who is, you know, the great rehabilitator of Stalin, went to war on Stalin's own homeland. Can you just talk us through what happened there? And because if you do this,

31:59one of those episodes that I think people forget in all the other noise that goes on. Technically at that point, Demetri Medvedev, who people will be able to go who, talking about historical amnesia, was the president of Russia. So Demetri Medvedev is still out there, you know, as a kind of almost a cartoon figure of sort of an attack dog for the Russian state, threatening to bomb and annihilate everybody in nuclear war. But he had been, prior to all of this, the prime minister to Putin's president, to kind of robin to Putin's Batman, which had actually been encapsulated in one of these reports that ambassadors, you know, sell, send back home, for example. And Medvedev had been selected to kind of take charge and take care of the country when Putin switched into the role of prime minister to take kind of a lesser role and not rupture of the continuity or the rules and regulations of the presidency. Now of course, Putin was always sitting

33:02alongside Medvedev in a kind of learner drivers seat in a car, grabbing the steering wheel at different points. So we can assume that Putin had a role in all of this. But the war in Georgia comes against the backdrop of the Olympics in the summer Olympics in Beijing. We have a kind of weird split screen as we get later with all the things that happen in Ukraine and as well of the opening ceremonies, George Bush there, Putin being there, George Bush being at the time, the president of the United States. And this incursion into Georgia because Mikhail Sarkashvili, the then president of Georgia had sparked off a conflict between Georgia and South Asetia, one of the breakaway republics of Georgia. So you know, it's all kind of around Stalin's birthplace, Gory, Stalin's hometown was actually bombed by the Russian Air Force in the middle of all

34:02this. It's all pretty complicated who started what. But it was clearly that the Georgians and Sarkashvili had been lured into, you know, basically a conflict that suited the interests of many people in Russia. Although it's not entirely clear, you know, whether this was going according to plan at the time. I was in the US government. We had a lot of questions about what happened. But basically, it was a lesson again to all of the neighboring states who thought that they could, you know, do their own thing, intervene in affairs at the times of their own choosing. It was a big, strong message from Moscow that Russia was still a boss and that they were not really independent states. And there could be an intervention at any moment. You just just mentioned about, you know, you're being in the United States and you know, you're very famous testimony, which it went viral about into this seeming blindness to what, you know, Putin's influence was on American policy. We did a series on Yalta and we had, again, we're doing this series on Stalin. So just bring it back to him. Stalin managed to charm FDR, Roosevelt in Yalta to the point where, you know, he really

35:09believed everything that Stalin told him. He really believed in this uncle Joe, Grandpa Joe kind of image that Stalin was presenting to the extent where he often shut out Churchill from very important meetings, which would prove to be catastrophic somewhere down the line. How has this charm offensive between Putin and the United States developed? Is it, I mean, people talk about Trump being under the Putin spell, but I mean, has this sort of been dribbling in for quite some time that people in America have thought, you know, what he's not Grandpa Putin, but Uncle Vlad, you know, when did it start? When it starts really with George W. Bush, and the very first meeting that he had with Putin in Slovenia, Putin's obviously done his homework on George Bush. And he knows that Bush's religion is very important to him. Bush is born again Christian, it helped him when it get overall kinds of personal problems, including alcoholism, for example. And Putin tells Bush's

36:12story. He purports to have been baptized by his mother and his grandmother secretly, and that they gave him a cross to wear around his neck. And he tells Bush the story about a fire in his dacha, in his country home, in which the only thing that survives the fire is this cross, and he pulls the cross out of his shirt to show Bush. And then, you know, after all of this having charmed Bush, and, you know, used religion to bring them together, because that's what you do. If you're a case officer, you look for something you have in common that you can build upon. He basically persuades Bush that, you know, the two of them can do business. And at this point, of course, everybody's hoping that, you know, we're away from the coal war standoff. You know, we have a whole series of things where Bush shouldn't actually use his father, you know, they've all, you know, tried to really improve that relationship with Russia. Putin, of course, goes to visit Kana Bunkport, the Bush family compound. You know, there's some sort of genuine and kind of sense that they might be able to work together there. But basically, Bush says that he got the measure

37:13of Putin when he locked into his eyes. Now, a lot of Bush is on to Raj, kind of robbing their heads and shaking them in disbelief. And Colin Powell, and a few other people are asked, later, what did you think, you know, about looking into Putin's eyes? What did you see? And Colin Powell, famously says, KGB, KGB, KGB. And much later, when I was actually somebody as an intelligence officer, in the National Intelligence Council, I had to do some deep dives and briefings for Bush. And I actually took me to one side and said, look, look, I just wanted to explain this whole thing, you know, about Vladimir Putin. You know, I just wanted to, you know, get, convey that kind of idea, like Margaret Thatcher had done, you know, during the coal war, that it was a man I could do business with. I wasn't that naive, you know, it's kind of a, you know, it didn't really get me completely, because it's obviously wrankled that in that moment, he'd been sort of seduced by that whole idea of a very pragmatic man who was actually something he could work with in putting the US and Russian relationship on a different footing. So, you know, this has been a pattern that we can go back to that early days of Putin.

38:14That means he's been with us for a very long time now, 25, 26, you know, he's, you know, obviously chasing Stalin's longevity in office now, if you can get towards 30 years, which, you know, at this point looks like he might, but who knows, right? I mean, it's basically, it's a pattern that he uses over and over again. It's the, it's the, it's the, it's the charm. It's the trying to persuade people that you think just like them. What is the seduction he's used on Trump? And do you think, are you, are you still in the camp that believes that there is a compromise or do you think that Trump is just falling in love with him? I think Trump is falling in love with him with the idea of him because he's a big powerful person, he's iconic, he's a badass, you know, that kind of American sense, he has unbridled power. And it's also that Putin always looks at people's vulnerabilities and what you can use to manipulate them. And it doesn't have to be compromising information. In the case of Trump, there's so much compromise on him. I mean, this is a man who's had how many lawsuits he's already been, you know, forced to make payments to all kinds of people, you know, all of his dirty laundry is out there.

39:16If there's any more, it'll just get lost in, you know, the wash, so to speak. But what Putin understands about Trump is that Trump responds extremely well to flattery. And up we have Mark Ruta of Neto going over the top in terms of his praise for Trump. He has calling him daddy. Putin doesn't go that far. Well, what did you make of that? What did you make of that? Well, I just thought that, well, I cringed like a lot of people did. But it's just exactly what Ruta, like Putin, has ascertained is necessary to do, I mean to basically kiss Trump's ass, you know, let's put it that way. In the pursuit of your own goals, now Putin has other goals and Mark Ruta does, obviously. Quite in contradiction to Mark Ruta's goals, which is to keep the United States and Trump firmly in Neto, which Putin doesn't want to say exact opposite. But Putin wants Trump to do all kinds of things from him. He thought he was literally his Trump card for getting Ukraine on a platter, the head

40:16of the Vladimir Zelensky, for example, so excited by, you know, what happened in the infamous meeting in the White House, for example. He must have been thrilled. Oh, he was absolutely thrilled when Trump and JD Vans just attacked Zelensky. This was just better than he could possibly have imagined. But what he does is, I mean, he yet he could jolt, he flatters and he persuades Trump. And often, Trump doesn't need a lot of persuading because he thinks in some respects in quite similar terms to Putin. And it's about money as well, because I mean, when you look at, you know, what's on offer all the time, both from Trump to the Russians or to everybody else in the Persian Gulf or with Iran or North Korea, it's all about offering people a kind of an amazing, you know, future where everybody has a condo. And of course, you know, somebody in their unturaged and family connects money out of it. Now, Putin does the same. I mean, that's also a part of the whole stack of being a KGB operative when he was in the KGB, which is offering people money, cash, women, you know, you name it. I've got a question before we've got to go to Ukraine,

41:18but before we get there, one last question. My friend Ann Applebaum has this theory that Lindsey Graham and the religious right have pulled America much closer to Putin because they see it as a Christian country unsullied by liberalism. Do you think that again is a, is the result of a Putin love, love bombing of the Christian right in the US? Is that another Putin play or have they come of their own volition? I think Lindsey Graham should probably be separated out from this because actually in the work of his recent untimely death, there's actually a move to put more sanctions on Russia in his name through Congress and the Senate at this moment because Lindsey Graham, you know, for all the other things that he did in support of Trump was actually pretty stole war instead fast in his support for Ukraine, you know, throughout the war. And he was, you know, a kind of classic Russian hawk in the Republican Party before, you know, basically joining forces with Trump for domestic and all kinds of other reasons. But in terms of the religious might,

42:20evangelical, you know, Christians or all kinds of groups of people, it does actually fall well into truly into that, this purview. In fact, what's been extraordinary interesting in relatively recent period in July of this year of 2026 is that Laura Luma, one of the influences in the kind of the mega, the mega, America great again on to Rajiv Trump, took a trip to Kiev. And suddenly started to see a kind of a different form of religion here. She visited the cathedral of the Domitian, which had been badly damaged by, you know, Russian drone attack on Kiev. And suddenly started to say, well hang on again, you know, Ukraine is actually a Christian country. And in fact, this has been at the core of Putin wanting to retake back Ukraine and Kiev as the very heart of Kievan Russian history, Kievan Rus as the progenitor of the Russian Empire of the first Christian core of the large imperial, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of Russia.

43:24And she starts to say, how can Putin, who I previously thought was, you know, basically the savior and the guarantor of all kind of Christianity, just in the mind that you've kind of layered out there, call himself a Christian and a Christian leader when he's presiding over this slaughter of other Christians in Ukraine and also the damaging of this amazing church. So, you know, it's very interesting. He's absolutely using the power of the church, the Russian Orthodox Church, domestically and using it abroad to kind of bring in everyone else as the kind of protector and the guarantor of conservative values. I noticed something and this is sort of to do with Ukraine and to do with everything that you've just talked about. But the victory day marches on the 9th of May, that there's a new bumper sticker around Russia, a new slogan which is, we can repeat. And that refers to Stalin grad, that you know what, attrition, we're good at it, we will win. And that it's applied to what's going on with Ukraine. What is going to happen with Ukraine? Now, when we look back on this in 10, 20 years,

44:27how is this all going to play out for you? Well, the Ukrainians are good at attrition too. So, part of the, you know, repurposing of this whole narrative about Stalin and about World War II, is you kind of forget that there was not just, you know, a kind of Russian empire in the past that had other parts of it, but also during the Soviet Union places like Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union. And there's always this attempt to go and make Khrushchev as a kind of symbol of a Ukrainian you know, background, the person who gives Crimea to Ukraine, etc., etc., which you know, is also more complicated than it looks at the surface. And yes, Khrushchev had worked in Ukraine, it'd been a minor, you know, kind of one point, you know, for example, but he wasn't a Ukrainian but there were many Ukrainians who served in the Soviet military and who were there at Stalin Grat, and as we know from all the work that Timothy Snyder has done on bloodlands, you know, for example, and Anthony Bivo and in his work on World War II in the Soviet Union, some pretty awful things happened in what is now the modern territory of Ukraine. And those were, you know,

45:31very much the scene of, you know, particularly heated battles, and there are all kinds of cities that emerge out of World War II as hero cities. And it's not just Stalin Grat, later Volga Grat, it's Crimea, it's Sevastopol on the, you know, the Crimean Peninsula, it's cities like Kiev, it's cities like Odessa that are in Ukraine as well because they're also besieged and, you know, taken over by Nazi Germany. And the Ukrainians go through, you know, not just World War II, but prior to that, they've gone through the Holodomor, the Grat famine, the Stalin inflicted on them. So you can see why I'm heading here that, you know, that you've already got this kind of whole history of where Ukrainians have suffered as well. So basically we've got competitive war of attrition going on here, where Ukrainians, despite the fact that they're much smaller in terms of population and size and resources, imagining, managing to bog Russia down, because Putin has forgotten

46:33that they were part of that same mentality of we're going to survive this as well. I've read several Russian experts over the last month who's saying that there is now every reason to think that the boot is on the Ukrainian foot, that the drone attacks on Crimea and so on have given it a whole new edge. Do you think Ukraine could bring Putin down there? Well, I think in combination with lots of other things, it's entirely possible that at least it constrain his options, you know, he gets blocked from going any further, the Ukrainian strategy, you know, right now is to take out logistics and supply lines, which we've seen with these long-wage strikes into Russian territory on petrochemical plants, for example. And even taking out supermarkets like wild berries in terms of, you know, the big wholesale storages, I mean, it's as best like the Roman sacking the granaries of, you know, every country and, you know, place that they came across. So I mean, again, this is a kind of going back to antiquity.

47:34And, you know, the Ukrainians, you know, have also managed to bog the Russians down on the battlefield, they've used drones rather than robots to really drain the Russians, you know, to bleed them, which is, you know, an awful thing to be thinking about, but that's their strategy. Block them, bleed them, take out all of their supply lines. Now, Russia obviously has an enormous amount of resources, one of the parts of the book that Cliff Gadion, I really focused on, the survivalist, was about Russia building up stockpiles, preparing for just this very kind of eventuality. So it's really going to also take a shift in thinking in Russia itself of those people around Putin. And, you know, you can see some signs for that. But I think Putin thinks he's still got, you know, quite a bit that he can lean into more that he can draw down on. But look, I think we'll have to see because as we all know, the role is exogenous shocks in the system. I think that the US attack, where with Israel on Iran is a major exogenous shock that hasn't actually been all that good,

48:36you know, for Russia, for example, because it, you know, put something else in the calculus that you really can't control. So I would just say we have to watch this space, but, you know, there could well be that just as you get in a war of attrition, both sides exhaust themselves to point where, you know, there has to be, and that's what a lot of people are hoping for, who want to end the war, of course, that has to be some kind of, it's obviously not going to be a reconciliation, but some kind of compromise reached. Fiona, it is always so fabulous to talk to you. Thank you so much, Fiona Hill there. We've looked at, walked a long road, Fiona and Giles and Anthony Beaver. It's been really good having these guides in this series on Stalin. Thank you very much for listening to us till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durimbo. Star Wars, the Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on.

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