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
And I think Stalin was tapping into this uh cultural and religious tradition of the Orthodox Church to turn Lenin into a
Avengers.
Relic.
And of course, Stalin would come back to this in the Second World War, where suddenly he allows all the churches to be reopened as he rediscovers holy patriotic Russia to try and bring the country behind him in the fight against Nazi Germany.
So I think this was Stalin thinking this is a good way, this is a good thing to do with Lenin's body.
I can add a little bit more grim detail to that, actually.
Um, his brain, they thought that Lenin was a was a genius and they wanted to discover um the source of this genius.
They sliced his brain into 30,000 wafer-thin segments.
And they used a machine a bit like you know, when you get Palmer Ham in the in the shops and everything, they slice it on.
They did that with Lenin's brain, and then they s they put them between plates of glass.
And they brought in a German neurologist.
Called Oscar Voigt, whose task was to study Lenin's brain and find out the the root source of his genius.
And he spent years looking at these through you know, through microscopes, and he wrote a 14-volume account of of Lenin's brain.
Unfortunately, he didn't find anything particularly different about his brain from anyone else's.
No signs of this supposed genius.
It's very weird.
You queue up, uh there's all these guards and all their uniforms standing, you know, very erect and everything, and then you file in, file past this sort of slightly uh yellowing, parchmenty, slightly mouldy
Well, you clearly saw him on a good day.
I caught him on a bad day.
You know, he was looking a bit moldy.
Showing 1001–1020 of 1,435 · page 51 of 72
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