396. Stalin: The Bolshevik Revolution (Part 2)

In March 1921, as his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva gave birth to their son Vasily, Joseph Stalin was close to death from a burst appendix. He survived—and within a year he would be appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party, a job that seemed like clerical drudgery but which he immediately recognized as the lever that could lift him to absolute power. This episode of Empire, with guest Giles Milton (author of The Stalin Affair), traces Stalin’s transformation from an overlooked, Georgian-accented functionary into the master of the party machine during the Russian Civil War and Lenin’s final years.

The Civil War: How Stalin Found His Brutality

The Bolsheviks had seized Petrograd and Moscow in 1917, but most of Russia was not with them. The counter-revolutionary White Russian armies, led by aristocratic former Tsarist generals and backed by Britain, France, America, and Japan, launched a civil war that dragged every corner of the old empire—Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Baltics—into a conflict defined by famine, disease, and political terror. Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions, pushed British troops and even a new chemical weapon into Russia to destroy the Bolshevik regime, a fact that would make his later alliance with Stalin in 1941 deeply fraught.