Giles Milton
speaker
1,435 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 2d ago
Giles Milton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Who did what, who was where when, and you know, who actually made this revolution successful.
Yes, the Poles are hoping to regain uh land that lands that they've lost uh in the in the Great War.
Uh they go to war with the the new Soviet Union.
Uh they do very well at first, but then gradually the Soviet forces, I have to say, under the brilliant command of Trotsky and his Red Army, remember Trotsky has built the Red Army from scratch into an incredible fighting force.
And by nineteen twenty they're pushing their way across Poland, and they are at the gates of war.
Warsaw.
They're almost uh there about to take the Polish capital, but they need more troops.
Where can those troops come from?
Well, Stalin has got a load of troops under his command, but Stalin is not interested in Warsaw.
He's interested in capturing the city of Livov.
And so he uses all his forces, all his energies, everything at his disposal to take the city of Lvov, which ends in Trotsky and his Red Army being defeated.
By the Poles.
The Poles see a glimmer of opportunity here.
They take it, they crush the Red Army outside the gates of Warsaw, and the Red Army is forced back into Soviet territory.
So this is a kind of a moment of humiliation for Trotsky, and he sees it, he blames it directly on Stalin, who could have come to his aid but didn't.
The landscape of all this, if you like, is the question of whether uh the Soviet revolution is a revolution in one country or if this is going to be a revolution that's going to spread right the way across Europe through all the Western democracies.
And there are very different points of view here between Lenin and Trotsky on the one hand, let's have rev try and promote revolution uh everywhere, and Stalin on the other hand, saying, hold on a minute, let's get let's consolidate the revolution within the uh Soviet Union.
So there's a sort of hinterland to this.
This whole whole story going, What's what's taking place?
The Palmer hand machine slicing Lenin's brain as well.
Showing 441–460 of 1,435 · page 23 of 72
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