Giles Milton
speaker
1,130 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 3d ago
Giles Milton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Poor old Nadia, who wanted just desperately to be more than just a housewife and doing the cooking and stuff.
And and already during the revolution, she's played quite a role.
She's been transcribing telegrams.
She's been working for Lenin's personal office as well.
She's played a role, and now she's got kind of nothing to do.
But she wants to do something, so she enrolls on the Industrial Academy in Moscow, taking a course in textiles.
We get a little glimmer of
The home life.
It's really fascinating in the letters she writes to Stalin.
She describes, you know, going into uh into college in the morning and the tram breaks down or the bus breaks down and this this sort of all these domestic details.
And you realise that what's so strange about these people, particularly Stalin, the monstrous Stalin, is he had a kind of quite a normal domestic life.
You know, life went on, they had their family meals, they had their picnics, they went mushroom hunting, they did all the
sort of stuff that usu people usually do.
And then he go into work and sign off sign off an order to killing fifty thousand people.
And it it reminds me a little bit like the sort of guards of the concentration camps who would go into the camp in the morning, order fifty thousand people to be gassed in the in the gas chambers, and then they come home for lunch with their wife.
And then go and go and listen to a string quartet in the evening.
Yeah.
That's what I found extraordinary with Stalin, is it this ability to separate these two things.
Let's murder fifty thousand people in the morning and then have a really nice picnic in the afternoon, you know.
No, and and I think this is compounded by the fact, um, and this is something we don't know much about, that clearly Stalin was having mistresses, he was having affairs, um, you know, he had this dacher in the countryside, he could pop off there with some attractive young woman.
Showing 241–260 of 1,130 · page 13 of 57
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