Giles Milton
speaker
1,435 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 4d 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
I mean, Stalin often gets accused of setting up at this period the architecture of what is going to become the sort of hallmarks of the repressive Soviet regime.
So people might be familiar with the Checker.
The Checker was the secret police.
Which would then become the much more familiar KGB.
There would be the forced labor camps, there'd be, you know, the one party state that was set up.
And everyone sort of nowadays says, well, that this was Stalin who set this up while he was acting as political commissar during the Civil War.
But this, I think, shows a complete misunderstanding actually of Lenin's role, because it was Lenin who set up the architecture, and it was Stalin who then exploited it for his own political.
you know, fortunes and future.
So the checker, of course, is a a very interesting organization because it will become the absolute sort of benchmark of state brutality, uh listening in on people, arresting them, uh torturing them and executing them.
Yeah, Tsaritsin was one of the uh big battles that took place in the civil war.
This was really Trotsky was his fingerprints are all over this, partly because he appointed a general called Sneznezarev, General Snezarev, who was um had been in serving in the Imperial Tsarist Army.
Now, this was something, a hallmark of Trotsky's running of the Red Army, is that he was completely prepared uh to use.
Army officers and generals who'd fought under the Tsar and proved their worth and proved themselves to be capable commanders.
And this threw him into a direct clash with actually both Lenin and Stalin, but particularly Stalin.
And this was particularly the case at this Battle of Tsarin, where the commander was this imperialist Tsarist general who Stalin, as political commissar, has arrested with all.
His junior officers and puts them, imprison them on a barge in the Volga River.
And this is quite extraordinary.
You know, he's he's only a political commissar and he's arresting a senior general uh conducting a battle on the battlefront.
Why did he do this?
Well, the argument is that he wants to dispose of these uh this general and these officers.
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