Josh Ireland

And one of the most important ones for this story is a meeting in Spain between Itingon...

and a family called the Mecadas.

So Itingon is out there to help the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, which Stalin is using as a sort of proving ground for some of the methods of repression that will be employed later on.

Stalin's not a man who lets a sort of war go to waste.

And the Mercados are this fascinating family.

They're bourgeois, semi-aristocratic from Barcelona.

And their family business falls apart.

So they're sort of thrown into poverty.

She begins teaching and very quickly gets, I guess we would call radicalized.

She's always been this sort of reckless person.

thrill-seeking personality.

And very quickly, she becomes both a communist and a heroin addict.

So the marriage doesn't last very long.

She leaves, takes with her the children who were brought up to sort of imbibe her philosophy.

And then when the civil war comes around, her eldest son, Ramon, who's this tall, handsome, charismatic figure,

starts fighting, he's part of a communist brigade.

And we can't precisely locate the moment when the NKVD recruited him, but there's this extraordinary moment where his younger brother's watching, and it's a cold, snowy day, somewhere in the hills of Russia, and he sees his mother and his brother talking.

And every time anyone comes close to them, they edge away, edge away as if they've got this incredible secret.

And then he said, from that moment on, I understood my, my brother was working for, they called them the Soviet Accords.

And so that's the, that's when Ramon unwilling, unwittingly becomes the sort of, he gets embroiled in this bigger thing.