Empire

Empire ·In the first episode of a new series on Stalin, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple start from a May 2025 replica of a Stalin bas-relief in the Moscow metro and Putin's stated reasons for letting Stalin return: his 2017 complaint to Oliver Stone that 'excessive demonization' of Stalin attacks Russia, and his framing of Stalin as an effective manager. Against that revival they set the record of famine and terror estimated at 15 to 30 million lives. The body of the episode follows the Georgian childhood: the conflicting 1878 and 1879 birth records and Robert Service's draft-avoidance theory; the violent drunkard Beso and the devout, ambitious Keke; smallpox, a maimed left arm, and seminary-era poetry that proves a proud Georgian. The Tiflis Theological Seminary, a Russification instrument under Russian Orthodox control, pushes the surveiled student toward banned books, the bandit hero Koba who gives him his name, and, after public hangings in Gori, the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery whose quarter of a million rubles prove unspendable. The closing movement contrasts Stalin with Lenin, radicalized by his brother's 1887 hanging, and traces how Stalin's writing and organizing won him Lenin's patronage: the Central Committee in 1912 and unglamorous backstage work in 1917. The hosts close by rejecting Stalin's own hand-in-hand account of his path to Lenin and promising a next episode on how a boring theorist became general secretary.