AI Summary
5 min readIn May 2025, a carved likeness of Joseph Stalin went back up in the Moscow Metro, a replica of a relief torn down decades earlier. That image, the hosts note, was where their series on the dictator began. The question animating the entire project is not really about the past: why is a man in the Kremlin, seventy years after Stalin died, so determined to put him back on the plinth?
To answer that, the episode brings on Fiona Hill, former national intelligence officer on Russia and senior Russia advisor on the U.S. National Security Council. Hill, co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, has sat in the room with Vladimir Putin. She reads him for a living. The conversation traces how Putin has moved through Russian history like a costume rack — trying on Stolypin, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great — and has now settled on Stalin as the latest set of "the Emperor's new clothes."
Stalin as Useful History
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:07) **Why Stalin Now? The Kremlin’s "Useful History"** - Fiona Hill joins the hosts to explain that Putin’s revival of Stalin is part of a long pattern of adopting different historical personas.
- 2 (06:57) **National Amnesia and the "Cromwell Defense"** - Hill explains how a society with such deep Stalinist trauma can accept his return.
- 3 (09:39) **Reprogramming the Future: The New History Textbook** - A discussion of the 2023 compulsory history textbook that rewrites Stalin’s legacy.
- 4 (12:17) **Stalin, the Church, and the Cult of Power** - Putin uses Stalin’s secular religion and the Russian Orthodox Church as tools to consolidate power.
- 5 (15:50) **"You Can't Have Light Without Dark": The Dostoevsky Defense** - Hill unpacks Putin’s core justification for Stalin’s terror.
- 6 (18:12) **The Case Officer: Putin as KGB, Not Just Stalin** - A key diagnostic frame: understanding Putin through his KGB identity, which is the direct institutional heir to Stalin’s NKVD.
- 7 (20:14) **The Trauma of Collapse: The Dresden Moment** - A warning sign: the origin of Putin’s drive to restore state power.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Fiona Hill is the leading authority on Russia and has been in the room with Putin and Trump. She joins Anita Anand and William Dalrymple to discuss how Stalin’s violent legacies have impacted Putin's approach to authority, and why he is reappropriating Stalin’s memory in Russia today.
What are the links between Stalin’s purges and the poisonings of Putin’s enemies in recent decades? How has Putin charmed Trump? And how does the memory of World War II affect both sides of the war in Ukraine today?
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