Giles Milton
speaker
1,435 appearances
4 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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It should be said, uh, one thing that is kind of interesting from outside of Russia is of course the the West knew very, very little about Stalin.
We mentioned earlier he never gave public speeches, he was never seen in public, or very little.
Little anyway.
And so the West was actually determined to try and find out more about this new uh powerful figure emerging in Russia and what is about to become the Soviet Union.
This was to have a profound effect in England, because England, during the First World War, had founded the Secret Intelligence Service, which was going to be wound down in 1918 because they said, well, the war's over, we don't need this thing anymore.
Of the Secret Intelligence Service, who's a man named Mansville Cumming, he said, Hold on a minute.
I've got some fluent Russian speakers who could who could go into Russia and find out more about this new regime, bring back intelligence on Stalin, on Trotsky, on these people.
He sent in a team of spies who were quite brilliant at what they did.
And some listeners will surely remember Riley Ace of Spies, an old TV series about Sidney Riley, who was
One of the spies sent in during the Civil War.
Another one was Paul Dukes, the only British spy ever to be knighted for espionage.
These people were sent in to try and work out who these strange and dangerous new revolutionaries were and what they intended.
Were they really intent on fomenting world revolution?
Were they really intent on bringing down the democracies of the West?
Or were they simply trying to take control of their own?
Country.
That's extraordinary.
This is when he's in Tsaritsyn.
Um, incidentally, I should as in sort of parentheses, I should say that Saritsin, this moment where um Stalin tries to uh arrest all of uh Trotsky's most faithful officers, this becomes uh in the in the story told by Stalin itself, it becomes one of the great battles in the Civil War, of which he is in the front line of it.
And of course, Tsaritzin will later be named the city of the city.
Showing 841–860 of 1,435 · page 43 of 72
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