Giles Milton

speaker
713 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 5d ago

Giles Milton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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None other than Winston Churchill, who in 1919 was
Minister of Munitions, and he pushed the government into sending troops and weaponry into Russia to fight the Red Army.
And notably, an extraordinary fact that towards the end of the First World War, the British have developed a new lethal chemical weapon.
Winston Churchill was a great fan of chemical weapons.
He believed they were more humane than the bloodshed of the trenches in the First World War.
And so he sent this chemical weapon, which was
A very powerful toxic gas to be used against Trotsky and his Red Army.
It didn't work very well in the atmosphere in northern Russia.
And in fact, the whole stockpile ended up being dumped in the White Sea.
But it gives some idea of the lengths to which Churchill was prepared to go to to try and destroy this regime.
And this will account when we wind forwards to the Second World War, to 1941, where Churchill goes to the United States.
goes into an alliance with Stalin.
It shows just how fraught and difficult it was to construct this alliance because Churchill had been one of the people back in 1919 who tried to get rid of Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, and the rest of them in the red in the Red Movement.
No, he was not.
Uh very much not so.
Um, the man in charge of the Red Army was Trotsky.
And Trotsky uh proved his worth.
He was a brilliant commander, he was brilliant at picking men to serve under him.
Remember, just as you touched upon, to give some idea of the scale of this fight, this covers the whole entirety of Russia.
Every single bit of the Russian Empire, uh as it used to be, um, was
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