Giles Milton
speaker
1,435 appearances
4 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 — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
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.
He he received letters, uh begging letters from women all across the Soviet Union.
Oh, Stalin, dear Stalin, I want to be in your embrace, you know.
So um pretty peculiar, really, but he did, and he acted on some of these at least.
And
And clearly poor Nadia knew about this and it left her absolutely distraught.
She just couldn't deal with it.
And remember, she was um not the most stable of individuals at the best of times.
Since there was a history of this running in the family, her brother had been really uh ill with psychological disorders.
She was not as strong in terms of her mind, you know.
And so every affair, every every rumour that she heard would chip away at that that stability.
Is indeed uh a tragic story.
All the uh party commissars have gathered for they have this dinner every year to celebrate their great victory in the revolution.
And at this dinner, um Stalin begins to behave, I think we'd say just boorishly.
You know, he begins to flirt with the women at the table, um, you know, sending out compliments to them and and at the same time completely ignoring poor Nadia, who's sitting there looking at him, just horribly.
Horrified at Stalin, the more he drinks, the worse he gets.
Showing 561–580 of 1,435 · page 29 of 72
← Previous
Next →