Giles Milton
speaker
1,130 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard yesterday
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 — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Uh what what side are they going to fall on?
They a lot of them would have supported the revolution, but now they're realizing they've been left completely without a voice, as they were under the old czarist regime.
Right.
So Trotsky comes out, harangues them.
There's a postscript of this to this story which is rather less glorious for Trotsky, is that he then, when they continue to be Trotsky,
Cruculent, he sends in the troops and brutally murders huge numbers of them.
So this shows that, you know, Trotsky, the intellectual, the dilettante, if you like, can also be just as brutal as Lenin and Stalin when he has to be.
I think they were all brutes.
All of the leading Bolshevik revolutionaries came from the same stable in terms of violence and using violence to keep control.
Just going back to one thing which was quite interesting about Totsky's role during the actual revolution itself, Stalin himself wrote at the time, he wrote that Trotsky had played the leading vital role in the revolution.
And when Stalin later came to publish his his sort of
collected works, that particular document was removed by him.
He wanted it expunged from the records.
He wanted no trace of that he'd ever said this.
So so you can see this extraordinary sort of rivalry between the two of them playing out in paperwork as well.
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.
Showing 121–140 of 1,130 · page 7 of 57
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