Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's ruthless spy master and architect of the Soviet atomic bomb, navigated the chaos of Operation Barbarossa by centralizing NKVD power while secretly warning of imminent invasion. Despite his brutal management of ethnic deportations and nuclear program using prisoner labor, his jealousy toward Zhukov and paranoia eventually triggered Stalin's downfall in 1953. Following Stalin's death, Beria briefly attempted systemic reforms before Khrushchev orchestrated his arrest and execution, halting potential changes that might have dismantled the totalitarian state. Ultimately, his removal shifted Soviet repression from open terror to subtle control, proving that even a "bloody hangman" could not easily break the system he helped build. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money and Wealth with Tiffany00:01:54
This is an iHeart podcast.
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On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
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This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
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We're still joined at the hip, just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
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Oh, they hit a BOGO.
Well, then you're done.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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Hitler Vibes in Stalin's Team00:15:15
And before we get to the episode, obviously a lot of people in Gaza need a lot of different help, but we've been connected to the Al Ghazawi family by a friend of ours who's doing aid work there right now.
They are trying to get 14 members of their family out of Gaza before things get any worse for them.
And they're raising money to do so on GoFundMe.
If you Google Help Al Ghazawi family escape Gaza, GoFundMe, you can find it.
Al Ghazawi is spelled A-L-G-H-A-Z-Z-A-W-I.
Yeah, we're trying to help them get to a safer place.
So please consider donating if you can.
Ah, boy, howdy.
You know what I love more than anything is a nice good piece of new Hitler news.
You know, for whatever reason, we don't get a lot of that anymore.
Baffling as to why, but I just came across the story's not new, but it's hit social media the way these things apparently sometimes do when people realize there's engagement to be gotten.
And the title of this New York Post article, Joe Kasabian, our guest host of the Lions Led by Doggies podcast, co-host and Sophie, my producer.
The headline of this article is Adolf Hitler's last living relative convicted of pedophilia.
And we get a picture of like a man who looks to be in his 60s with like a bald head that's entirely a tattoo.
All right.
And very yellow teeth.
And look, folks, no one would love it more than me if there was some new Hitler gossip that made the family look bad.
There's no reason for this.
Fresh Hitlerism.
Some fresh Hitlerisms.
The first line of the article is a man claiming to be Adolf Hitler's last living relative has been convicted of pedophilia.
And this guy is a creep and his last name is apparently Hitler.
But there's other Hitlers.
He has other living relatives, right?
Like this guy, even if this guy is related to Hitler, which I have not done the work to confirm, he's not the last Hitler.
I mean, I wish he was.
He's going to do, you know, when you're convicted, when you're convicted or charged with pedophilia, you got to take some of the heat off.
Like, man, when anybody Googles my name, they're just going to come up with pedophilia, pedophilia, pedophilia.
How can I possibly beat that as a headline?
I know I'm a Hitler.
He is the one guy who could mitigate being convicted of pedophilia.
It's like, okay, this is bad, but compared to my uncle Hitler.
Well, it's, you know, like, it always reminds me that, you know, Willie Hitler, Hitler's nephew, retired to upstate New York after serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II and then died and kept, you know, kept the sea.
He changed his last name to, I think it was Stuart Huston or something like that.
You would want to, you know, if you're not a Hitler.
Yeah.
And one of his neighbors said, you know, like, because once it came out who he was, like, then the local news is interviewing all of his neighbors.
And one of my favorite lines I think I've ever read in any local news piece is his neighbor's like, you know what?
Now that you mention it, he did kind of look like Hitler.
He did kind of have a Hitler vibe to him.
Yeah.
He was kind of Hitlery.
There's another story that's a bit more accurate than this, which is that all of Hitler's last living relatives agreed independently not to have kids.
Not entirely true.
There are a number of Hitler relatives who were like, probably shouldn't make any more of this.
Probably had enough of the Hitlers.
All the Hitlers gathering around this circle, putting their hands in and say, back shots on three.
It is, you know, I do actually kind of feel like maybe it's worse to be like, as a Hitler, I'm not going to have any kids because you're kind of leaning into his weird attitudes about genetics.
Because Hitler wasn't Hitler because of his genes.
He was Hitler because of his Hitler.
That reminds me of, so I can actually talk about this now because they never made me sign an NDA, but the History Channel interviewed me to possibly host a show about Hitler a couple months ago.
Oh, man.
I wanted the job so goddamn much.
Yeah, of course.
And for some reason, it involved me repelling down rock walls and stuff.
I'm not entirely sure why.
But the other thing that could you really report on Hitler.
And specifically Hitler's DNA.
Like, I didn't give a single flying fuck because the topic is so stupid.
But I'm like, you're telling me I get to be on the history channel, repel down rock walls and spout dumb shit about Hitler's DNA.
This is like, if you told eight-year-old me I'd get to do this, you'd be fucking ecstatic.
Yeah.
Wow, that was a long dissent.
Speaking of long dissents, let's talk about the last 10 years of Hitler's life.
Yeah, there's good ways you could do that.
You know, Joe, everybody loves talking to Hitler.
Not everybody loves talking Hitler, but enough people do that it's a pretty reliable source of content for a number of people in this show.
For people who do a job like me and you, Hitler is a never-ending font of content.
Yeah, he really has done the podcasters and history channel documentary producers of the world is solid.
Speaking of things people love to talk about, World War II.
Now, I don't think it's controversial to say most people who have a favorite war, that war is World War II, right?
And people love talking World War II for the same reason that Warhammer 40,000 is now the most profitable export in British history.
It's got a little bit of everything, right?
And if the experience you're looking for in a war is an almost Michael Scott-like story of executive incompetence leading to disaster and unbelievable awkwardness, well, the big dub-w dose has that one in spades, brother.
And this brings me back to the story of Joseph Stalin and his buddies, which now includes Lavrinty Beria as an integral member.
And at this point, pretty experienced ethnic cleanser, right?
He's good at deportations.
He's done a lot of practice, right?
Yeah, he's up there, right?
Top 10% of deporters in the world at this moment, right?
Almost unquestionably.
And, you know, 1940, 1941, prior to Operation Barbarossa, everybody in Stalin's inner circle, almost everybody.
We'll talk about Molotov in a second, but most of the people in Stalin's inner circle, including Stalin, know some kind of conflict is coming with the Nazis, right?
Stalin, though, and again, when people say that, and that's accurate, they often mean that to be like everyone knew that a war like World War II was for Russia was coming, and they did not, right?
Stalin would not have made a lot of the choices he made if he felt like the World War II that Russia got was right in the offing, right?
Yeah, he'd probably be a little bit less purgy.
A little less purgy, a little more have some kind of effective defenses set up for the Wehrmacht, you know?
E, a little less keep his entire air force grounded so it gets blown up on the tarmac.
E, you know, couple of things he might have done.
Kill so many pilots they can't even fucking fly effectively.
Some changes would have been made, right?
And when I say that like Stalin doesn't know the war that's coming is coming, it's part of what I'm saying is because Stalin is certain a conflict's coming, but he thinks they've got years before anything happens, right?
He thinks they've got, we've got enough time to rebuild the Red Army from the purges.
And not just to do that, but when the USSR moves west to take eastern Poland, to take all these like Baltic states, right?
Stalin has his troops disassemble the fortifications on their western border, right?
Because he wants to move those up, right?
He doesn't want there to not be fortifications, but he's like, well, we'll take these apart and we'll rebuild a defensive line closer to the new border, right, with the West, which has moved forward a lot.
But there's like an awkward period in between taking apart the fortifications that had existed and getting the new ones up.
And they're not going to have that new set of fortifications up by July of 1941 when the Nazis unleash Operation Barbarossa, which is still the largest military operation in the history of mankind.
Hopefully always will be.
Always going to put it in the middle of the story.
I want to see it get beat.
Always going to put an aspect next to a statement like that.
You don't want to tempt anybody into beating the Guinness Book of World Records like the executioner.
You got to close it up.
God, I would love to see the Guinness Book of World Records entry for that, though, just based on the executioner one.
Yeah.
While Stalin is convinced that there's going to be a fight, and Hitler's obviously got one planned, there's this awkward interstittle period in late 1940 where Molotov, as the USSR's foreign policy guy and is the dumbest guy who's close to Stalin.
I don't know if that's generally agreed by historians.
Myri, having read a couple books about these guys, Molotov was kind of the dipshit of the crew, right?
He doesn't seem like the sharpest sickle of the hammer, you know?
He is, he is not the best of them, right?
And Molotov is kind of notably the guy who is most convinced that like we actually might be able to ally with the Nazis to fight the British, you know?
He has kind of a fantasy that this might be possible.
And he has this fantasy because Joachim von Ribbentrop, who's his opposite.
I mean, again, it's the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, right?
People are aware of this.
Yeah.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, his opposite number in Germany, has kind of like incepted this idea that like, oh, you know what?
I know our bosses don't get along, but like, I feel like Hitler might let the USSR in the tripartite pact.
You could be member number four.
You could be on a team with heavy hitters like Italy.
Come on.
Italy, you know?
Notable military mastermind, Benito Mussolini.
You know who always pulls their weight in 20th century war?
The Italians.
Guys, don't worry.
They can't possibly switch sides on us again.
It is very funny.
Italy is like the case study of a country, this amazing period of like utter military dominance and then just never gets their shit together again for a thousand years.
I'm being a little unfair to a couple of the city-states, but it's for the purposes of comedy.
I don't think, and I don't think anyone really thinks there was ever a serious possibility of like the USSR and the Nazis allying against the British in a realistic way, right?
But Molotov thinks it might be possible for a while.
Now, again, he's not fully convinced of this.
And Ribbentrop, it's kind of a back and forth with trying to like keep Molotov on board with the idea.
And Ribbentrop, who's also a little bit of a dip shit, nearly has a panic attack because like Molotov is in Berlin.
They're talking all this through and the British launch an air raid.
And, you know, Ribbentrop is like, don't worry, Molotov.
The Brits are already beat.
And in a rare moment of lucidity, Molotov asks, well, then who is dropping the bombs on us?
If you've got the British on the ropes, who is bombing your capital?
Which, to be fair to Molotov, that's not a bad question in the moment to ask.
That'll buff out.
It's buff out of Berlin.
I have the last gasp of a dying empire carpet bombing the capital.
I just bought another house.
I can't happen in war.
Right.
Your capital's going to get a little completely destroyed in a way that very few cities in history have ever been destroyed.
But hey, come the 60s.
It's going to be great.
It's great for real estate prices.
Ask Rotterdam.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rotterdam's going to eventually be doing very well.
So this does not deal directly with Beria, but I found a passage in Sheila Fitzpatrick's book on Stalin's team that I enjoyed too much not to share.
Molotov had a meeting with Hitler too and observed with interest that he was trying to do propaganda on him.
Evidently, he was very one-sided, an extreme nationalist, a chauvinist who was blinded by his ideas, which is not a bad description of Hitler.
I just find the Hitler's doing propaganda on me.
Imagine that from Hitler.
You think this guy shouldn't propaganda me?
I don't know.
He seems like such an honest customer every other time.
Propaganda from a Hitler?
No.
So Beria's actual role in this period, pretty obvious.
As the USSR spy master, he is responsible for ferrying reams of information to Stalin that make it very clear the Germans are about to invade.
There's a lot of data on this, right?
They have no good reason.
And Beria, I mean, not to his credit because of what he's about to do is not handle this the best way he can.
But Beria has plenty of info to be like, well, yeah, obviously they're about to fucking invade, right?
Like they have 3 million men massed on the border.
This is not the hardest thing to figure out.
They're just camping.
You know how the Germans love fresh air?
Yeah, we love tents.
We loves the ground.
It's very nice.
My German accent, terrible.
Anyway, so this is a dangerous position to be in because Stalin has already made up his mind that the Germans are not going to invade, right?
Yet, you know?
So Beria, you can't just go to Stalin and be like, you're wrong.
They're obviously about to invade because telling Stalin he's wrong is a great way to wind up not alive anymore, you know?
So Berry has got to thread the needle of he has to warn Stalin because when they do invade, you don't want Stalin to be like, where was the fucking evidence of this, right?
Why didn't you tell me they're invading?
You also have to set it up in a way that you're not saying I told you so because he'll just kill you, right?
This is a tough, to be fair to Beria, that's a hard position to be in, you know?
And there's no one waiting in line to be the one that finally gets to kill Beria.
Like, oh, please let him fuck up.
Yeah, they've got like a tantine going.
Now, in a memo written just days before the invasion, Beria laid out a huge number of warning signs that one was imminent before concluding with forced cheer that since Stalin had figured out nothing was going to happen, it was all probably fine.
It is kind of a masterclass in ass covering.
But part of protecting his own ass was that Beria had to attack the military officers who were trying to warn Stalin and the intelligence officers who were trying to provide warnings, right?
And in his book, Sangster writes, quote, Beria also knew the facts and was worried about an attack in the Caucasus oil fields.
It amounted to a curious problem because such was the fear of Stalin that no one wanted to disagree with him or even suggest he was wrong or upset him.
Beria went so far as to accuse the head of military intelligence of being a liar, even though his own information backed those observations.
Now, I think the funniest, maybe saddest example of how deranged things get is that, like, obviously Germany had had a lot of communists before the Nazis win.
A lot of those communists just kind of sink back into the woodwork, the ones who are not prominent enough that they're going to get purged or at least not going to spend too long in a camp, right?
A lot of guys get put in a, you know, what are called wild concentration camps for a while and they have a bad time, but they eventually get out.
NKVD Security and Supplies00:13:00
And a decent number of these guys get drafted into the Wehrmacht later, right?
And some of these, a significant number, I think, of these guys in the lead up to Operation Barbarossa are like, well, I don't want to invade Russia.
I am still a communist.
And they sneak across the border to try and warn the Russians, right?
To try to warn Comrade Stalin, like, hey, guys, the fascists are coming, right?
I'm assuming that they're all going to be immediately, seriously, and nothing bad happens to these loyal German communists.
They are treated as spies.
That's what you get for trying to stop Operation Barbarossa.
Damn.
On June 22nd, 1941, some 3 million Germans, complete with a lot of tanks and trucks, but even more horses, cross the Soviet border and start committing war crimes.
Like there was a shortage at the war crime store, which is just a TJ Max.
In the first few days, the Wehrmacht encountered minimal resistance and Soviet losses were nightmarishly like high enough.
Basically, pretty much any other country in the history of the world would have collapsed from the kind of casualties the Soviets are taking in these early days of Barbarossa, right?
Like they are losing the entire modern day active duty strength of the U.S. Army in some of these engagements in terms of like captured, right?
Primarily.
The only time you ever read about casualty numbers quite like this is reading about like, I don't know, any war involving China.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Like the war over the heavenly kingdom, the Hong Kong or Taipei Rebellion, which is like 100 years, which we also did a series about.
Right.
Thanks for that layup, Robert.
Yeah.
These are, these are unthinkable.
Like, again, the entire U.S. would collapse if we had losses like this.
It's impossible to really copy.
What casualties have we suffered today?
Oh, the entire population of Cleveland.
Yeah, yeah.
We lost a Portland out there.
Sorry, guys.
Most of San Francisco just got captured.
So Beria had given out orders, you know, kind of, because again, not the Wehrmacht, but the Luftwaffe is doing like some cross-border air reconnaissance and stuff in the days leading up to this, right?
And on the day of the attack, right?
Obviously, planes are heading in a lot of areas ahead of the ground troops.
They're doing attacks.
They're bombing airfields.
And because it's unclear initially, is this an invasion?
Is there some sort of fuck up?
I mean, it's pretty clear to people who are not blinkered by, you know, not wanting to anger Stalin what's happening.
But Beria, acting on Stalin's orders, orders that Soviet troops not fire on these planes that have crossed into Soviet airspace because like Stalin doesn't want to provoke a fight, right?
A little late on the draw there, Jay Stahl.
Maybe they're just lost.
Yeah, maybe they're just lost and bombing our airfields mistakenly.
Maybe they think they're their own airfields and they just need to get rid of some planes.
It happens.
After his fall and execution, Beria was denounced as a traitor in Soviet history books for this.
But this is not really fair.
This is the only time I'll say this.
That's not really fair to Beria, as Sangster points out.
Beria had in fact warned Stalin on June 12th, writing that in a few instances, they, the German aircraft, had penetrated 60 miles or more in the direction of military installations and large troop concentrations.
Stalin appeared paralyzed and decided not to blink in case it provoked the Germans.
Really bad call.
I think we can all agree here.
Look, I understand that they're bombing us.
Maybe it's some misunderstanding that only exists in the warped brain of pre-stroke Stalin.
Yeah, yeah.
Hope maybe pre-stroke Stalin.
We don't know when that first one hit, right?
He may have been throwing a blood clot at this point.
Yeah, he may have been popping a couple of clots.
You know what they say about Jay Stahl.
Really clawdy.
Really clawdy fella.
Now, depending on who you ask, after the invasion, like in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Stalin either has this panic attack or just a mental collapse, or he executes a complex face-saving plan based on Russian history.
And the truth is probably kind of all of the above, right?
We do know that he is panicked and not hard to see why.
If three million Germans invaded me, I would probably be a little worried, right?
Normally you have to pay for that kind of treatment.
No, I had three invade me at a hostel once and it was a real problem until I found out they had Molly.
Then things got a lot better.
But it was rough for a little while, let me tell you.
Now, we know Stalin was furious for once at himself, right?
He has this lion where he's like, we, including himself in this, like foolishly squandered Lenin's great inheritance, right?
There's like this moment where he's like, he can't deny like, oh, this is a real, this is a real fuck up on my part.
This is, this could have gotten a lot better.
Guys, I kind of dropped the ball on this one.
You know what?
I fucked up a bit here.
And he immediately flees the Kremlin for his country house where he locks himself away for the rest of the government for, I think, like a week.
And you have to presume he gets the kind of drunk that no one else has ever gotten, right?
This is probably a unique level of fucked up.
Like this isn't walked into a German invasion.
Yeah.
It's, you know, the Dr. Manhattan floating on the moon's surface level of enlightened drunk.
Now, the people who will say like he was also kind of doing, he was, he was, he was in his reaction to the invasion, directly sort of signposting some stuff from Russian history will point out that like Ivan the Terrible, who was the ruler of Russia from like 1547 to 1584, had fucked up in a pretty huge and obvious public way himself.
And when he did in the wake of it, he like fled to hide alone so that his nobles could come and find him and beg him to come back.
Right.
And this is sort of like, he felt like there was this need for him to be like, I made a mistake and them to say, we still want you to run things.
Right.
I don't, I'm not enough of an expert on like why that was necessary, but people will argue that by sort of fleeing to his dacha like this, Stalin was doing the same thing.
And I don't see why that wouldn't be part of his calculus, right?
It makes more sense in a man like Stalin to have like a complete emotional breakdown.
Sure.
He's not really a man that felt emotions.
Right.
And I don't see why it can't be both, why he can't be like, I'm really fucked up and maybe this is the end for me, but also maybe my best chance is to like do this thing that there's already kind of like a precedent for in history, right?
A little bit from Columbia, a little bit from Colin.
A little bit from Colin.
A lot from a bottle of vodka.
A lot from vodka.
Now, you know, in Ivan the Terrible's case, the nobles, or I'm guessing they were his boyers.
I think that's the term, you know, for it.
In Stalin's case, the nobles that have to come and like ask him to retake the reins of power are his circle of buddies.
And this is going to include our boy, Beria.
And so they all show up at the Dacha.
And Beria, before they show up at the Dacha to go pick Stalin up off of his sick puddle on the floor, Beria is like, we should form a new organization, the State Defense Committee, to organize the war effort.
And what'll really make Stalin, what'll really pick him up, like perk him up, is if we make him the head of this thing before we come and get him, right?
Come on, man.
You can be in charge.
Come on, buddy.
One thing you got to give him, you know, not every bastard is the best at something I've ever heard of.
He might be the best ass kisser I've ever heard of, you know?
Well, I think that's really, he really has that.
He's tongue deep in that motherfucker.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
He is, he is past the colon.
He is like Gene Simmons up in there.
He is feasting like he's at a golden corral of ass, which is just a golden corral.
So Beria and everybody else, they all travel to Stalin's dacha to assure him, hey, buddy, we still love you, right?
We still want you to be our czar, effectively, right?
And Barry is like, and look, man, we made this whole new committee.
You're in charge of it.
Don't you want to come back and maybe we all do a World War II together?
And Stalin, he kind of like looks down at the floor and he looks up at his buds and like the music, the heartwarming music starts to play.
And he's like, yeah, let's do a World War II.
And then everybody hugs, you know?
That was three days from retirement.
I do kind of want a World War II Stalin's Inner Circle movie, but starring the main two characters from the lethal weapon franchise.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
I mean, to be fair, Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic enough to play Joseph Stalin.
Honestly, he could be either of them, right?
Yeah.
So the reality is that everybody gets back to work, you know, in relatively short order, but not in a way that is initially effective or efficient.
Again, these guys have a lot of skills, right?
They're not bad at everything that they do.
Beria is the stuff we've talked about him doing in terms of organizing these deportations and mass executions.
They're bad things to do, but he does them competently.
None of them really know how to wage the largest war in the history of human experience, right?
Which to be fair is quite a task.
Yeah, you got to figure, you got to pick up the ropes as you go along, right?
We can't all be George S. Patton, the reincarnation of Hannibal.
Oh, what a beautiful maniac.
We'll talk about him one of these days.
He's got an episode or two.
What a bastard he was.
Real bastard.
Right about the M1 Garand, but wrong about everything else.
True.
So Stalin's first instinct, because things are going very badly for the USSR, is to try and sue for peace.
He has a lot of territory.
And he's like, if Hitler just wants land, I'll give him some fucking land.
Can we work this out, right?
I've got a lot of Russia.
I can afford to burn, you know?
You want some Baltics?
You want the Baltics?
You want some Ukraine?
Take it.
I didn't even want it.
Zhukov visits shortly after the invasion, being one of the few guys who's in the military incompetent that's left alive.
And he meets with Beria and Stalin.
And it's again, you know, any report you have from inside the inner circle in this period is imperfect.
I trust Zukov more than most of these guys.
Not that he doesn't have some face saving to do, but I trust him more than most of them.
And he claims that when he meets with these guys, they are both like in panic mode and convinced that victory is impossible, right?
The doom saying, Beria and Stalin are both so like blackpilled on their chances that at one point Zhukov has to ask, Conrad Stalin, do I have permission to do my job, right?
You are clearly panicking too much to handle anything right now.
Can I go do a war?
Right um, silence descends upon the room after this and just a few months later, this would have ended with Zhukov shot in a ditch, right.
But Beria, all that happens in this case is Beria just kind of gives this limp warning that like well, the opinion of the party is important, the party being Stalin and Zukov's like I don't give a fuck about that right now.
Man, like do you want to win this or not?
You know, like we're either fighting, there's not going to be a party in a three weeks yeah, so obviously this is not a military history podcast.
There's plenty of places where you can go to read about how the situation in the east gets turned around.
Well, it's not the east to Stalin, it's largely the west.
But you get, you know what i'm saying.
While millions upon millions of people are dying fighting the Nazis, life gets a lot better for Beria.
World War Ii is really good for him because he, of all of the people close to Stalin, he's one of the guys who's kind of most useful in this situation.
Right, because he's a logistics guy, you know.
And prior to the outbreak of war, the security agencies had already been fairly centralized, and once the war really kicks, everything gets centralized within the NKVD, which makes him unequivocally the most powerful security chief in the history of, like almost any country.
There's not a whole lot of competition yeah, and there's even elements during like World War Ii, where the NKVD has its own military formations and, like Beria, patently refuses to allow the RED ARMY to command them.
And he has the power to do so.
He sure does, and he's not going to be great at that part, but what he is good at, he is kind of one of the guys who's in charge of this very famous effort to basically disassemble all of these Soviet heavy factories that are producing war material and move them east right so they can get reset up.
And he he's because he's so good at logistics, he's one of the guys who's organizing this in a big way right, and he's, from at least what i've read, seems to have been competent in this kind of stuff.
Um, he does a lot of in addition to running security, a lot of, because a lot of like what the NKVD armed units are doing is ensuring that, like supplies get places right, because obviously you need soldiers doing that to some extent, and I don't think he's incompetent at this.
Building Within the System00:02:38
Now, in addition to all of the practical shit that he's doing.
Beria finds time to get up to some hideously evil bullshit as well the Volga region, of course he does.
This is our boy Beria, we're talking about here.
You know he's not going to shelve his hobbies during a whole war.
He's surrounded by death.
This is what he was built for.
Yeah yeah, this is what he was built for, just like our audience was built to be advertised to.
So take out your credit card, marry it to me, i'll buy some stuff for you or for me, you know, for some purchasal and berry.
A coin Yeah, Barrier Coin, our new, our new cryptocurrency.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
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You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
Beria's Nuclear Clout00:15:58
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back, and my Beria coin is now worth, I don't know, seven negant revolvers or almost $35.
So that's pretty great.
I feel like the instructions are unclear in BeriaCoin.
For people who don't know, you can actually use three slurp juices on your BeriaCoin.
Yeah, and that's how you get a Malenkov.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe.
I'm not sure how this would work.
I'm not really sure how we want to play this.
Now, in addition to all of the practical shit this day, again, so the Volga region includes a semi-autonomous kind of German republic.
It's what it's called semi-autonomous, right?
This is a part of the USSR, but it's not a part of the USSR that Stalin trusts prior to the war.
And because these people are like ethnically German, this isn't going to be, it's not a good time to be an ethnic German in the Soviet Union, right?
Probably don't need to explain why.
Beria has MKVD men dress up as German paratroopers and land in towns in this area to test the loyalty of German ethnicity citizens.
Their reaction, which I think is like the normal reaction of civilians to soldiers swarming your area, which is like, please don't kill me.
I'll do whatever, right?
It's the way most people act in this situation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Their reaction was used as a pretext to abolish this quote-unquote autonomous republic and forcibly ship hundreds of thousands of Volga Germans east, mostly to Siberia or Kazakhstan.
This is going to prove to be, again, there's this other frenzy of deportations that hadn't really ended from like the wave we talked about last episode, but millions more people are deported because they're considered traitors by dint of their ancestry.
And of course, these brutal actions forcing these people, thousands and thousands of folks die, right?
Amy Knight writes this about that period of deportations.
Beria's matter-of-fact reports, of course, reveal nothing of the human suffering that was wrought by this mini-Holocaust.
Tens of thousands, including women, children, and old people, perished while they were being transported like cattle in overcrowded railway cars without water or food.
In the process of shipping the Chechens in Ingush, the NKVD had decided that it can make do with fewer railway cars by crowding 45 instead of 40 persons into each carriage.
A perfectly reasonable decision, he observed, since almost half the contingent were children.
He added that they had also been compelled to do without sanitation facilities, and consequently, an epidemic of typhus had broken out.
One of those who survived the trip later described it.
In cattle cars filled to overflowing without light or water, we traveled for almost a month to our destination.
Typhus was having a heyday.
There was no medicine.
During the short stops at lonely, uninhabited stations, we buried our dead near the train in snow that was black from engine soot.
It was forbidden with punishment of death to go more than five meters from the train.
Many more died of famine and disease once they had reached their destination.
So not good.
Yeah, bad stuff, you'd say.
And in terms of how Beria feels about this human catastrophe that he's overseeing, we have his constant notes to Stalin suggesting that he should be awarded for the stunning successes he'd experienced in doing ethnic cleansings.
The war years were, indeed, good for Beria, but he had a constant annoyance.
By necessity, the military was given a great deal of independence and latitude because you kind of need them, right?
You can't fuck with them the same way when they're actually the only thing stopping the Nazis.
And he can't even purge officers anymore.
Right, right.
That is Beria's attitude, right?
Because guys like Zhukov are increasingly allowed to make major calls and even question Stalin's judgment and Beria's judgment.
And that's going to piss off both Beria and Stalin.
Beria does continuously through the war try to force his way into making military command decisions.
And this is something he's always bad at.
In October of 1941, Soviet pilots spotted German troops advancing on Moscow.
Beria took the photographs and hid them, telling everyone they were warmongering and trying to cause a panic.
Sankster notes that time and time again, Beria tried to threaten his way into giving orders to the military, and the military has to go to Stalin to be like, can you fucking get this guy in pocket?
Like, you know how bad things are right now?
It's October of 41.
Look, Joe, can you point this guy towards another minority that needs to be sent to Kazakhstan?
Leave us alone for another two weeks.
Have him do another crime against humanity.
We've got some shit to handle here.
Now, one of Beria's more ridiculous blunders came during the height of the fighting, when every rifle was needed, and Beria sought to equip a bunch of his troops, these NKVD soldiers guarding rear areas far from the fighting with the very best weaponry, right?
Because the Soviets are starting to produce what are legitimately going to be some of the best guns of the war, right?
Some of these like first automatic rifles and stuff that are kind of in wide circulation.
And they don't initially have a lot of these and they're kind of all needed.
But Beria wants the shiny toys for his guys, even though like, well, some dude who's actually going to be shooting a bunch of Germans should probably have these guns before your guys, right?
You were like guarding a train station, maybe?
And when Voronov, who's a top general, informs Stalin of this, Beria whispers to Voronov, just you wait.
We'll fix your guts.
Such a piece of shit.
That sounds like it could be simultaneously a threat or the worst pickup line I've ever heard.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Now, Beria reserves a special hatred for Georgi Zukov because Zhukov, reasonably good at being a general, right?
There's again, like anyone who's in this position, a number of valid criticisms of his command choices here, but he's not an idiot, you know?
He's certainly one of the top two that the Soviet Union produces between him and Bogramia.
Right, right.
And he's in the same situation.
I would compare him in some ways to a guy like Grant, where there's times where you can say like he's just throwing men into a meat grinder, but also like, well, I don't know.
There weren't that was probably unavoidable to some extent.
We can argue how much less it could have been, but he's in a tough situation.
I wouldn't have wanted his job.
Like sometimes a meat grinder is your only choice.
We did a series on the Battle of Kursk a while ago, and there's just like, oh, no, this is like a solid battle plan as long as one of the checklists is like we can lose a lot more people than you can, which is a legitimate military strategy.
It's just it looks really bad on paper later on.
Yeah, it's ugly, but it's World War II, right?
Like Zhukov is, and because of this, Zhukov is even after the war, he's not totally impervious.
Like he, he, he takes some hits after the war, right?
But even after the war, he can't be purged in the same way other guys can because he's fucking Zhukov, right?
You know, and Berry hates this, right?
This scares the shit out of Stalin.
And Berry is kind of just jealous beyond words at the guy.
In May of 1945, as things are winding down and the Red Army enters Berlin, it becomes clear that the time of greatest threat was well past, right?
Stalin can get back to tightening his grip on power, and these military guys have a little bit less clout because we're not really at risk of losing anymore, right?
Yeah.
So Beria starts to kind of try to push to get back to murdering anyone competent, to posing a threat to whatever bullshit he wants to pull.
And as a result of this, Zhukov winds up in both Stalin and Beria's sites.
And I'm going to quote from Amy Knight here.
Beria managed to get his deputy, Ivan Serov, appointed Zhukov's assistant, serving as chief of the civilian administration in the Soviet zone of Germany.
Henceforth, reports began to trickle back to Stalin about Zhukov, that he was boasting about his victories, and even that he was planning a military conspiracy against Stalin.
Beria's men also did all they could to keep important information hidden from Zhukov.
It turns out, for example, that he was not told that Hitler's body had been found.
He did not know that autopsies were carried out and an investigation launched to confirm the identity as well as the cause of death, which is like wild considering what Zhukov's job is at this time, that you're not letting him know that you've autopsied Hitler.
All of this culminates in Jay Stahl denouncing our boy Zukov near the end of 45 during a meeting at the Kremlin.
Zhukov, notably, is not at that meeting, but he is eventually summoned to stand before the war council and made to answer for his crimes.
It is sometimes suggested that Stalin wanted to have him executed, and he kind of floats this to the other military leaders of the USSR, and they're like, what the fuck are you talking about, man?
Zhukov?
You want to kill Zhukov now?
That's not going to work out.
There's no way.
And it kind of, it says a lot about his position that Stalin has to back off on this, right?
Some of this might just be the fact that like Eisenhower and Zukov are legitimately buddies.
One of my favorite cute facts of the war is that like they get along so well that like Zukov gets shipped Coca-Cola, I think, for the rest of his life that's made just for him.
If I remember correctly, he also, Eisenhower also gives Zhukov like a fishing kit that he uses.
Yeah, if he uses for the rest of his life.
If I'm not mistaken, the tackle box that Eisenhower gives him is by his bedside when he dies, which suggests like it's not really hard because like Eisenhower and Zukov are like the only two guys that can understand being in that position.
Yeah, they're going to get along great.
Yeah, I'm not surprised they had some things in common.
So during the war, Beria also makes clever use of the Gulag system that he had helped to build, well, at least helped to expand in order to further Soviet war aims in a way that furthered his career.
And this is possible because prior to the outbreak of hostilities, a lot of people who had been arrested and taken into custody were scientists, engineers, and physicists.
And Beria, again, not a dumb man, knows that he doesn't want to kill these people because you can get.
officers who are okay or at least train them up.
You can replace political men.
You can't really replace genius scientists and physicists easily, right?
Yeah.
So he keeps a lot of these guys in pocket.
He has like special prisons for them that are certainly a lot safer than the other prisons.
And when the war really gets running, he gets these guys working designing new weapon systems and stuff for the Soviet Union.
And that's one of the things that gives Beria a lot of clout in this period is he has a lot of these guys who had been kind of, you know, out of favor prior to the war.
And he's, you know, he's able to get them working.
A lot of these guys get their sentences commuted, right, because they're so necessary.
And this is going to really play into what happens next because Beria's direct involvement in the production of war materiel is evidence of not just his general cunning, but his understanding that his position is based on continually putting himself directly in front of Comrade Stalin's eyes at all times, whatever Stalin is focused on.
Stalin's focused on the war.
I need to be making shit for the war, or at least I need to be facilitating the making of shit for the war, right?
Because that's the way to maintain my position.
After the war, I don't know if you're aware of this, Joe.
It ends in the Pacific with the U.S. dropping a couple of nuclear bombs, right?
I think I've heard of it.
Yeah.
Kind of a big deal, the fact that we do this.
And when we drop these bombs, there's a strong argument to be made that the primary reason we do drop them is to make a big show of force to the Soviet Union, right?
This is heavily debatable.
I certainly don't, some people will make the claim that is not supported that like, oh, Japan was right about to surrender without it.
Like, no, they were like trying to float this thing whereby the emperor would stay the emperor and they'd get to handle their war criminals on their own.
Not really the same.
Yeah, they were not agreeing to unconditional surrender, which was the, I believe, since Yalta was the main and only acceptance that they're taking.
There's many layers to the atomic bombing.
Right.
And none of this is saying the atomic bombing is a forgivable crime.
I'm not saying that.
Yeah, but there is, especially when you look into, you know, Operation Downfall, which would have been the mainland invasion of Japan, which would have been significantly worse and also still included nuclear weapons.
Right.
You know, things could have been giastrophically worse.
But all of that can be true and also true that we dropped those bombs in large part because we wanted to make a point to the Russians, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
All those things can be true at the same time.
Right.
And what becomes clear to the Stalin and to everybody who's not, who's like, has any level of like, I don't know, intellect at this point is that once the U.S. has dropped nukes, the Soviet Union's going to need nukes of their own, right?
Very quickly.
It's hard to see how they get to that.
And look, like the whole lesson of the 21st century is never give up your nukes if the USA is pissed at you, right?
Or if Russia's pissed at you.
Nukes are generally like a solid bulletproof vest to have as a nation.
Yeah.
If you have them, keep the fuckers, right?
I don't love that that's the lesson of the 21st century, but it's hard to argue with.
And that's why I personally never gave up my nuclear weapons.
No, I have not kept one in my desk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I just keep one on me at all times.
I like to strap it to my bicycle when I go cycling.
You know, people give me a white berth.
It's part of my everyday carry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nuke, yeah.
Flashlight, just the basics.
See, boat cutter.
If you were tasked with the job of developing a nuclear arsenal for your country, neighborhood, or household, what's your first step going to be?
Oh, to spy on the people who already have one.
Well, yeah, that is actually exactly what happens, right?
And that's why Stalin is going to eventually appoint Beria to handle this job, right?
And it's not hard.
Again, it makes a lot of sense.
Berry is not just a talented organizer.
He's proved he's good at kind of the materiel game, and that's a part of figuring out how to make a nuke.
He's also pretty good at building a team to like accomplish a goal.
And he's also pretty good at massacring those teams, you know, when they need to be massacred.
Beria is also the spy master.
And a lot of the Soviet bomb ambitions are going to be, shall we say, floated by their ability to infiltrate the nuclear weapons programs of the United States and the United Kingdom, right?
Right.
So Berry is actually appointed to head up the Soviet atom bomb project on August 7th, 1945, the day after the U.S. bombs Hiroshima, and he creates a new department at the NKVD, Department S, which is going to host the agency's nuclear research efforts.
This is not the beginning of Soviet efforts of developing, towards developing a bomb, of course.
The Soviet Union does not lack for skilled scientists.
And as early as 1940, Soviet physicist A.I. Kurchitov had given a report to the Academy of Sciences about how a theoretical nuclear weapon might work.
Petr Kapitska, who is, I think, probably the most famous Soviet physicist of the era, had brought the matter up again in 1941.
And the main reason the USSR falls so far behind the U.S. on this research is they get invaded, right?
That throws a little bit of a wrench in things.
That'll slow you down.
We might not have been able to do the things that we were doing if we were like fighting the Nazis and the Sandiyas, you know?
Probably would have been a little harder to establish that facility.
Oppenheimer would have been a different movie.
As much nudity, but differently shot, you know?
Still would watch it.
Still would watch it.
So to help make up for this gap that's caused by the fact that they're fighting this war, Beria, spy master for the USSR, starts collecting and disseminating nuclear secrets from the British, U.S., and German nuclear programs.
This is something he's doing all throughout World War II, right?
The Nuke Czar Debate00:08:53
Now, one of his best spies is a guy named Klaus Fuchs, who missed his true calling in joining the adult film industry and thus was forced to study mathematics and physics.
At age 19, he joined the German Communist Party, which was difficult because he happened to turn 19 in 1930, a notably bad time to be a German communist.
Great time.
Yeah, really, really bad timing on turning 19, fucks.
Fuchs, whatever.
So when the Nazis take over a few years later, Fuchs deports himself over to England and he gets a job as the research assistant to a professor of physics.
He receives his PhD in 1937 in physics, and then he gets another PhD at the University of Edinburgh just for fun.
He applies for British citizenship at this point, but is a little late on the draw, failing to beat the outbreak of war.
He was interned in Quebec for a spell before one of his professors pulls strings to let him out, basically being like, we're trying to build nukes.
The British atom bomb project, which is under the code name Tube Alloys, starts in like, you know, around this time.
And in May of 1941, he gets kind of brought out of internment to work on this project, right?
So Fuchs's work got him.
I'm basing this on the character from Barry.
I assume it's pretty close to that.
Yeah, I assume it's the same.
They even look probably similar.
It's fine.
It's probably played by the same actor, in my heart, at least.
So Fuchs's work gets him British citizenship in late 1942.
And it's one of those things where he's a great scientist.
Man, what a reward.
Yeah.
Becoming British.
Yeah, congratulations.
You're now a British citizen.
Like, can I go to Canada still?
Yeah, could I be Canadian, maybe?
As soon as he gets this job, he starts working as a spy for the GRU, right?
Or for, I think it's the, I guess, the KGB at this point.
I forget.
I always mix up my spy agencies.
Again, they go through a bunch of them at this point, right?
But he's handing Soviet spies classified information about British nuclear ambitions, right?
Kind of through the whole war period.
And he's really good at this, right?
He's good enough at this that not only does no one notice that he's spying on the British nuclear weapons program for the Soviet Union, but he gets transferred to Los Alamos to help the Americans with their much cooler atom bomb project.
There, he calculates the yield.
I think he's the first guy to calculate the yield of an atomic blast in like a precise manner.
And he studies implosion methods.
He's one of the people who's there to see the Trinity test in person.
And he continues spying during this whole period of time, which he sees as his duty to the cause of global communism.
As Russia's spy master, or at least one of them, Beria oversaw the project of using Fuchs and several other spies who were close to the project.
I found an article published by Columbia University's Atomic Heritage Foundation that notes: Fuchs also passed detailed information about the hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union.
Some experts estimate that Fuchs's intelligence enabled the Soviets to develop and test their own atomic bomb one to two years earlier than otherwise expected.
And there's a little debate about this.
I think the U.S. is kind of saying at the end of World War II, the Soviets will probably have their own bomb by 1953, somewhere around there.
Obviously, they beat that by several years.
I think 48 is when they do it.
And it's pretty widely agreed.
It's because they have a lot of really good intel from their spies, right?
That this definitely moves up the timeframe.
And if I remember correctly, with the first Soviet nuke is effectively a copy of like one-for-one copy of the American one.
Yeah, in a lot of ways it is.
I'm not enough of an expert on nukes to lay into that, but it's widely agreed that all of the spying that Beria is managing moves forward the timeframe on this significantly, right?
It's possible maybe Stalin doesn't live to see a Soviet nuke without the spying program, right?
I don't know how likely that is, but it's possible.
And when it comes to the morality of doing this, it's kind of something I can't really fault them for, right?
Like, I don't like nukes.
I think it's bad that either Trump or Putin right now could end all civilization on a whim, but I know the U.S. pretty well.
And if I'm heading up a country that's already been invaded by us and realizes they're about to be the big enemy, I'm going to try to build my own nuke, you know?
Of course, I would do the same thing.
Who wouldn't, right?
Yeah.
I mean, like, I think like geopolitics is inherently immoral.
You can't bring ethics and morals into geopolitics.
And especially when it comes to, you know, once that box has been open and nukes exist, it's kind of a vacation of your moral obligation, I guess you could put, like defend your country if you don't have one.
Yeah.
And it is, I think, like we can look at this new, like these nuclear programs as like Schrödinger's greatest crime against humanity, where like, right, one could argue the fact that the U.S. and the Soviet Union build so many of these things stops a more devastating war from occurring.
But also at any moment today, they could end everybody's life.
So we really don't know how this is going to shake out in the long run.
That's one of the biggest motherfuckers of the ultimate defense against a nuclear bomb is another nuclear bomb.
So you're kind of, you either allow yourself to become a plausible victim of said bombing or build your own doomsday device and threaten not with like self-defense, but like, if you fuck with me, I will set the atmosphere on fire.
If we have a big enough fight, everybody dies.
Yeah.
Messy situation.
Now, Beria did, or Stalin did, consider handing the job of nuke czar, which is a thing people will call Beria and is a pretty cool job.
That's a sick name.
That's my new ska band name.
Yeah, nukes are, right?
He considers handing the job initially to the actual scientist, Kapitska, but Stalin decides that someone that famous is a bad pick.
So he picks a lab director named Kirchatov.
In general, management of the program was initially Molotov's duty before Beria gets that job, but Molotov is bad at this because he's bad at a lot of things.
Kirchatov had direct contact with Beria because Beria is sending him all this info on spies.
And near the end of 44, Kirchatov starts pushing to get Beria the job.
One of his colleagues later said, now, of course, everyone knows that he, Beria, was a bloody hangman.
But at that time, Kurchitov turned to a member of the Politburo, a man with great authority who had influence over Stalin, right?
This guy sucked, but he was maybe the best dude for the job.
So that's who I wanted to have it, right?
Now, Beria is not actually in the Politburo until 46, but you get the idea.
These guys wanted to make a bomb, and they know that Berry is probably going to be competent at running the program.
Amy Knight writes about how the project actually got underway.
Much of the construction of building and installation was done by the NKVD since 1946 MVD prisoners, as was the mining of uranium and radium.
Prisoners were also used for atomic energy research, 50% of which was done in special NKVD centers called Shirashi, such as those described in Solnitsyn's The First Circle, where highly trained specialists worked in captivity.
The Atom Bomb project, ironically, shows a gentler side to Beria.
It's perhaps closer to the kind of manager that he would have been if he'd been born later and gotten a corporate job, right?
When he couldn't murder anyone who pissed him off, right?
Yeah, if he's just like a middle manager at like Sears.
This is because he can't just kill these guys, right?
They're world-class physicists, and there's not an innumerable number of those dudes, right?
He can't stop them through violence and rights.
Right.
And he doesn't want to torture them because that might make them not good at doing the job anymore because torture is generally bad for you being a scientist.
Kapitska is well aware of this and he does not get along with Beria, complaining to Stalin that the man wasn't even a scientist and didn't understand physics.
Beria retorted that Kapitska didn't understand people and they may have both been kind of right in this.
Regardless, Kapitsa starts asking Stalin to remove him from the project.
Stalin shows Beria this letter and Beria invites Kapitsa to come over to his house for a talk.
Knowing Beria, that usually means he's going to kill you.
That's not a good letter.
Yeah, that's not a good letter, but that's not at all what happens because he can't really get rid of this guy.
And I'm going to quote from Knight's book here.
Beria, who apparently wanted to make amends, then went himself to see Kapitsa, bringing with him a magnificent present, a double-barreled Tula rifle.
He like gives him a gun to try to get him to build a bomb.
It's just such a different Beria than you get the rest of this story because he has to kind of turn the oil on a little bit.
There's something like even more evil about this because it tells you this whole time, he didn't have to be the way that he was.
Financial Control for Everyone00:02:33
No.
He didn't have to be a violent psycho.
He enjoyed it because he could, you know, influence people to get what to do what he wanted them to do by being, you know, a middle management people person.
And instead, he's like, I'm going to beat them to death until their eyes pop out instead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a future where Beria just gives everybody a gut, gives tens of thousands of people guns instead of murdering them.
Yeah.
Lavrentiy Beria, NRA chairman.
Right.
Yeah.
If he just goes the NRA route on this.
Speaking of the NRA, that's the only supporter of this podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand a system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
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Mushroom Clouds and Secrets00:15:38
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
I'm feeling good.
Having a happy day, having a good time.
Never want to stop at all.
So, let's get back to it.
Perhaps thanks to Fuchs's example, Beria did not trust the scientists that he and the whole USSR relied on to build their atom bomb.
You know, he's the spy guy, not surprising why.
His NKVD provided strict security, and while the best scientists may not have been murderable, they were open to other kinds of punishments, right?
You get wildly different accounts of Beria as a manager, and I think based on the amount of coercion he had to employ for each person, one of Kirchatov's colleagues later claimed, Beria was a terrifying man, vile.
We all knew this.
Our very lives depended on him.
But Russian physicist Yuli Karaton had a different take.
Beria quickly heartened all work on the project with necessary scope and dynamism.
This man who personified evil in the country's modern history possessed at the same time tremendous vigor and efficiency.
It was impossible not to admit his intellect, willpower, and purposefulness.
He was a first-class manager, able to bring every job to his conclusion.
And I can't tell you who's closer to right.
Perhaps it's just a matter of opinion based on what your job was.
I mean, honestly, from everything that we've heard, it sounds like the second guy is probably true.
Yeah.
Like it's probably like, he's an evil fucker, but like every single job he's been put in charge of with the exception of weaseling his way into military operations, he's incredibly good at.
He has like applicable attention to detail because he's a fucking insane person.
Right.
He's a huge asshole.
But he does like this works well.
The Soviets get their bomb pretty fucking quick, you know?
Beria also helps head up the recruitment of former Nazi scientists for atomic research, which is a thing that the Soviets do with almost as much gusto as the United States.
Now, one thing I will give the Soviet Union initially is that unlike in the U.S., their Nazi scientists are basically put in prison at first, and every activity is carefully monitored and their liberty is curtailed because they're Nazis, right?
Beria actually changes this because he goes to visit the factory basically where these guys are working.
And he's like, well, you're not meeting any of your timetables.
What's wrong?
And they're like, well, we're in prison and that's not very fun.
And so he actually reforms the conditions for these German scientists and like makes their lives a lot nicer.
Yeah, memory serves me well.
The Soviets actually took in more Nazi scientists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Beria is responsible for them treating them a lot better, you know, which from a managerial standpoint is a good idea.
From a moral standpoint, not great.
Yeah, but again, the history written all over it.
Like very perfect Sears middle manager, like we've, like we've kind of discussed.
He's an incredibly efficient bastard.
One of the most efficient, honestly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very efficient.
And like, for again, obviously the right decision from a making a nuke faster point of view, right?
Beria is present both for the start of the first Soviet atomic reactor on December 25th, 1946, and the detonation of their first atom bomb on August 29th, 1949.
There is a fun coda to that story.
After the successful blast, he kissed Kirchhatov and said, in essence, thank God this worked.
I would have had to kill somebody otherwise.
But after that, God forbid I'll have to go back to the old me.
Yeah, I don't want to have to go back to the old me.
But then after this like moment of elation, he starts to panic again because he's like, oh my God, what if this doesn't look, didn't look like the American blast, right?
Is my mushroom cloud normal?
Do I have, did I have a good mushroom cloud daddy?
And he has to call one of his spies who'd been at the Los Alamos tests to like confirm that their nuke blast was normal.
Like it's beautiful, Beria.
You've got a really good mushroom cloud.
Yeah, nobody wants to be a mushroom cloud measuring competition.
Nobody wants the bigger mushroom cloud that they got to experience a few years before your mushroom cloud.
Stalin's going to love it, man.
He's going to really like it.
Don't feel bad, Barry.
Don't worry, Lavrenti.
What's more important is with, not length.
See, and I talk about this a lot, Joe.
I think it's really my primary moral issue with the Oppenheimer movie is that it provides this like really unrealistic expectation for how a mushroom cloud should look.
And I think a lot of secret policemen and dictators out there working on their own nukes are going to feel like my nuke isn't good enough if it doesn't look like the Oppenheimer nuke.
And that's just, it's fucked up.
You know, it's the same as having Channing Tatum's beautiful abs out on display for everybody to look at.
It sets an unreasonable standard, you know?
That's not fair.
All nukes are beautiful.
They're keeping all of us with, you know, normal-sized mushroom clouds, making us very self-conscious about the horrific devastation that our mushroom cloud can.
I want to know what movie you're thinking of with Channing Tatum.
That's what I'm talking about.
Oh, Magic Mike, of course.
Magic Mike Tattoo Minute.
I know.
I just wanted to make sure that your reference was, in fact, from like 10 years ago, like it usually is.
I just want to say, because I know Kim Jong-un listens to this podcast a lot.
Your nukes are valid.
Your world-ending hell weapons are beautiful.
And I see you, Kim Jong.
You know, I just want him to know.
I just want him to know that.
And I feel the same to the British, whatever fucking shit they call a nuke, right?
It's good enough, guys.
It's good enough.
Smoke cloud and beans come oozing.
It's a fucking chip buddy sandwich.
Yeah.
They call those butter and potato chip sandwiches.
Yeah, they've got one of those loaded onto a sub.
Why not?
Right.
At the point at which they use them, it doesn't matter.
So anyway, Beria eventually gets convinced that his nuke is good enough.
And he calls Stalin.
This is like the chief moment of it.
He's so excited to get to tell his boss, we've got a nuke now.
And all Stalin says is, I've heard, and then hangs up.
Such a Stalin move.
He can't like praise him too much.
No, absolutely.
You got to be really careful in this moment, right?
And Beria gets furious and he threatens the operator on the phone line.
And he's like, you have put a spoke in my wheel, traitor.
I'll grind you to a pulp.
It's like, oh, my name is Steve.
You name the telephone operator sitting right next to you.
Like, yeah, if you have any complaints.
So this was possibly the fact that Stalin responds this way, evidence of his growing dissatisfaction and distrust in Beria, right?
Which is heightened by the fact that in these post-war years, Stalin is deteriorating rapidly.
He had always been paranoid.
World War II ages him.
Not hard to see why, right?
And in fact, a famous neurologist, Stalin had been having issues for a while.
In 1927, a famous Russian neurologist had diagnosed him with paranoia, and Stalin had had the man poisoned.
In 1937, another one of his doctors had written of Stalin.
He was headstrong, consistent, and had extraordinary willpower and nerves of iron, excellent memory.
He suffered mainly from two pathological states, megalomania and a persecution complex.
Stalin had this guy shot.
So there's also like, you know, most of the best doctors in the Soviet Union got taken out during the doctor's plot.
Right.
Well, yeah, that's coming up.
But even before that, Stalin is having guys purged from saying, like, hey, man, maybe take some CBD, homie.
You know, like, chill out a little bit.
After like the sixth or seventh doctor to get whacked for like giving some a diagnosis, you have you're, you're the eighth doctor that has to go in like, nah, dude is jacked, yoked, dick down to his graves.
He is the pinnacle of Russian manliness.
12 pack?
My God, I've never seen so many abs.
I've never seen, I've never seen a man have abs on his legs before.
And you know what?
Even though he's not Russian, he's Georgian, he is the pinnacle of Russian manliness.
Nothing wrong.
Absolutely.
Your knees are actually additional abs.
It's remarkable.
I've never seen anything like it.
I've never seen a dick do a push-up before.
It was incredible.
So there's probably not much that medically could have been done about the fact that Stalin is increasingly unhinged and it starts to have, especially in the kind of this late period, a series of strokes that are steadily degrading his capacity to function.
We don't know precisely what's going on, right?
We can intuit some from the actual medical reports we have and just some from his symptoms that this is like he's stroking out and he is gradually losing, you know, his ability to like function as a result of that.
And I found a paper on Stalin's last years for the European Journal of Neurology, which summarizes the boss's state in the late 40s and early 50s quite well.
Quote, after the war, Stalin's natural suspiciousness and fears reached new heights.
He admitted to Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet armies, to living in fear of his own shadow.
Silence terrified him.
At a Politburo dinner, he noticed Andrei Zdanov sitting silently.
Stalin exploded.
Look at him sitting there like Christ as if nothing was of concern to him.
Zdanov paled with fear.
Stalin also complained about Władysław Gomułka, secretary of the Polish Communist Party.
He sits there all the time looking into my eyes as though he were reaching for something.
And why does he bring a notepad and pencil with him?
Why does he write down every word I say?
He's just losing his mind.
And you know, he was starting to stroke out when he started just demanding people put their own tomatoes in the pockets and then surprise because he couldn't do it anymore.
Yeah, he doesn't have the dexterity.
In 1951, in front of Politburo members Anastas Mikoya and Nikita Khrushchev, whom he did not appear to notice, Stalin exclaimed, I'm finished.
I trust no one, not even myself.
One of the more lucid things he says in this period.
He probably shouldn't have.
The last person on earth I would trust if I was Joseph Stalin was also Joseph Stalin.
Look, he wasn't wrong all the time.
Yeah.
So Stalin had demoted Beria, making him resign his post running the NKVD in 1946.
But this was not really a big deal.
Berry had retained most of his influence, at least for a while.
He's still running this critical bomb project.
And like, it's actually kind of a reasonable thing to do objectively.
Building a nuke is a big job.
You probably, both of these, you might not do them as well, right?
Yeah.
You know, we probably need someone else to handle that kind of stuff.
You know, I made sure when CoolZone started its nuclear weapons program, I made sure that we took other stuff off of Danil's plate, you know, just because I want him to get that bomb ready for us.
It's the only way we're going to win against the pod save guys.
What's Sophie?
We've tried peace with them.
It's simply not an option anymore.
I mean, this is also why I have attached listening devices to all of your animals so I could then steal your nuclear weapons for my podcast.
That's right.
That's right.
You're really.
And soon we'll have mutually assured destruction, which is going to take us both to a new level in podcasting.
It's the only thing that we could possibly do.
Yeah, it's the logical next step.
You should have accepted our offer for peace.
I feel like we were really fair.
Yeah, we were really fair.
All we wanted was to deport them to the east.
I put a bottom land in Kazakhstan.
New York City, where they all live anyway.
I could do Kazakhstan, you know?
So international observers at the time kind of noted that like it's this could have being taken out of directly leading the NKVD actually might have worked out for Beria in the long term.
There was a way in which this could have been a real win for him because like it's dangerous being the secret police head.
Stalin is going to die.
And when he does, if you're running the secret police, historically, there's a good chance you're going to get purged, right?
Because we've already covered this wave a few times, right?
It's not so many purges.
You purge the purger, right?
This could have, this might have, and it kind of almost does, put Beria in a natural position to be Stalin's successor, which seems to be what Beria wanted, right?
But the fact that he is kind of obviously positioned as one of the potential successors also puts him in the crosshairs of an increasingly irrational and paranoid Joseph Stalin.
Now, as you talked about a little earlier, Stalin doesn't like his doctors, right?
And Beria, he's having Beria arrest growing numbers of them in this period of time.
And as he's, again, he's convinced this is also married to Stalin's anti-Semitism, which gets really unhinged in the 50s, in the early 50s, right?
Like he is kind of going off the rails.
Some people will say he might have done his version of the Holocaust had he stayed alive long enough.
That's really unprovable in any way, shape, or form.
But it's not impossible, right?
Knowing the guy.
He certainly is a lot.
Part of why he's having a lot of these doctors arrested and even killed is because they're Jewish and he doesn't trust them, right?
Of course.
This is why Maul Gibson's been training his whole life for this role.
Right, right.
Again, he would be a good pick for Stalin.
Now, because he distrusts his doctors and has had Baria arresting so many of these guys, Stalin starts taking health advice from a less than trustworthy source, primarily one of his bodyguards who had previously been trained as a veterinarian.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah, we're getting like the Soviet version of GeoP.
Yeah, he is.
I love this guy.
This fucking vet who's coming in like, well, I know how to fucking remove a shit from a horse's impacted colon.
Yeah, I can probably handle your hypertension.
And the treatment he gives Stalin for hypertension is boiled water with iodine.
I don't think that's what you want to do for your hypertension.
Comrade Stalin, you must put Jade Egg up your man pussy.
This is, by the way, there's a new show on the regime.
Really watching it.
Kate Winslet, I think.
It's really solid.
I think it's mostly, there's a little Stalin.
It mostly seems to be based on Ceausescu.
Yeah.
But you get a little Hitler, you get a little Stalin.
You get a little bit of Trump, obviously, in there too.
It's good, though.
It's actually like really, I think, pretty smart.
And obviously, Kate Winslet is really good at it.
And also the male lead, I think, is very good.
I didn't like him in the first episode, but I've liked him a lot.
I just binge-watched the whole thing yesterday.
I'm still just like three episodes in, but I'm a big fan so far.
Anyway, I say this because it's kind of covering a dictator in the same sort of period that Stalin is in, right?
When they're starting to lose their mind and fall for all this bullshit health stuff, right?
In 1948, Stalin has Molotov's wife, who is Jewish, arrested for treason.
Khrushchev vs. Beria00:14:32
That same year, he demotes Beria.
And this is really what hits Beria, right?
The 1946 one, generally seen as like not actually a loss for Beria.
He actually starts to carve away a lot of his power after 48.
He is convinced of a, obviously, of a Jewish conspiracy that involves a lot of these doctors in Moscow.
And he has his security services take action against them.
And I'm going to quote from an article by Mark Safransky, published by ASU Center for Strategic Communication.
Most of the unfortunate doctors who were arrested by the KGB and lavishly tortured had conspicuously Jewish names.
They were accused of planning to kill Comrade Stalin and having killed Zdanov.
And this was all too reminiscent of the Kirov case that launched the Great Terror.
And again, because like Zdanov dies, there's this belief that he had been killed by this like Jewish plot.
That's part of the evidence that people say that if Stalin had lived longer, things could have gotten real fucking ugly, right?
Because this mirrors the situation that leads us to the Great Terror, right?
Now, the doctor's plot and this kind of obsession with anti-Jewish conspiracy that Stalin believes, this is not the only paranoid fantasy panic that he has in his ailing years.
And the one that's going to hit Beria the hardest is the Mingrelian affair.
Now, this hasn't been a big part of the story because Beria doesn't identify super strongly as a Mingrelian nationalist, right?
But we talked about this.
This is that like kind of ethnic minority within Georgia that Berry is a part of, right?
Around the kind of last period of his life, Stalin cooks up this theory about a Mingrelian nationalist ring that is urging a separate ethno-state with the backing of, quote, Western imperialists, which like, obviously the U.S. has plenty of plots to try to like take out the Soviet Union during this period.
I don't think this is one of them.
I've never come into any evidence that we're trying to establish a Mingrelian state in Georgia.
As they say, as Migrelia goes, so goes the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
I think if you had brought this up to any of the guys running the U.S., they would have been like, Ming, what now?
Ming the Merciless?
Is that in fucking Mongolia or something?
What are you talking about?
Yeah, but what are you talking about?
You're saying it's in Georgia?
There's a Mangrelian grill in Atlanta?
Fucking wins.
Let's go.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, let's take a ride.
So Stalin launches a brutal purge of the Georgian Communist Party, targeting Mingrelian members to be arrested and shot.
And because these guys are Mingrelian and Berry is the kind of guy he is, a lot of these are his protégés, right?
Like Stalin is kind of, and I don't know that Stalin really believes this is happening.
I think it's likelier he is trying to get rid of Beria's support base.
And this is a convenient way to do that, right?
Now, if you know Lavrenti, again, his identity isn't huge to him, but this really like does damage again to kind of like a lot of the people that he's going to rely on once Stalin is out to help him take power.
On the night of February 28, 1953, Stalin holds his normal dinner party at his dacha.
As usual, it lasted until almost dawn.
While Stalin is usually not a heavy drinker, he's kind of, he'll have a little bit of watered down wine.
He'll water down some vodka, you know, and he'll get kind of buzzed.
He's usually pretty buzzed.
He doesn't get hammered.
He likes everyone else to get hammered because then he's in control, right?
Because he's Stalin, you know?
But this night, it's noted at least, and again, everyone who was there, none of them are reliable narrators, but also medically, it makes sense that this would have happened.
The people who were there say he got fucking hammered tonight, that night, right?
And that would have, because he is a guy with untreated hypertension, getting drunk when you have untreated hypertension will raise your blood pressure, right?
I mean, getting drunk raises your blood pressure.
And if you have untreated hypertension, that can cause a stroke, which is what happens, probably.
Stalin has a stroke and a fatal intracranial hemorrhage.
This is essentially where the movie The Death of Stalin begins, right?
I'm going to guess a lot of people have seen that.
And again, the specifics, it doesn't really get a lot of them right.
But I think if you watch the movie, the broad strokes of it are close enough for like what most people would actually need to know about how this functioned, right?
Beria, as is depicted in the movie, like everyone else, probably thrilled to see his boss struck down because he had very clearly been on the chopping block, right?
Yeah, he was on his way out one horrible way.
It's not like Berry was going to get retired to his dacha or something.
He was eating the millimeter-based pension plan.
Right, right, right.
Now, there was, it probably would have been a Makarov, right?
9x18, just judging by the time period is my guess.
So there's no obvious successor, and Stalin's inner circle jockeyed for position around him.
Khrushchev and Beria are the most capable plotters of the group, and the two initially work together to push out Malinkov.
But then Khrushchev turns around and allies with Malinkov against Beria, right?
We don't need to rehash the whole thing, but there's this kind of interregnum period of a few months after Stalin's death, right?
The movie condenses it to a much shorter period of time, but there's a bit of space there, right?
And these are busy months, right?
Berry is first thing he's going to do is carry out this series of mass releases from prison, right?
Of all these guys he had had locked up, right?
And he pushes a slurry of reforms as well.
Sheila Fitzpatrick actually credits him primarily with the early reforms that follow Stalin's death, writing, within six weeks as head of the security police, he had released the Jewish doctors, investigated Mikole's death, and informed the team of Stalin's involvement, forbidden the use of torture in interrogations, transferred much of the MVD's, that's the NKVD's industrial empire to civilian ministries and set in motion the release of more than a million prisoners from the gulags.
I mean, this has to be just saving face at the last minute, right?
Well, yes, yes, this is not.
None of these guys, all of these guys, anyone who has lived in Stalin's inner circle this long, you don't do things for reasons other than survival, right?
Of course not.
You know, you wouldn't have lived that long if you were that kind of fella, you know?
So again, I don't credit this with him doing it out of the goodness of his heart, but it does show like where his mind is of like what I need to do to position myself, which is I need to be the guy who's pushing all of these reforms as fast and hard as I possibly can.
Now, he also cleans house at the MVD, which is again the successor to, you know, it's the NKVD.
And he replaces these guys who had been kind of put in to erode his power base with some of his own people who were still remaining, right?
Khrushchev and the other inner circle members know Barry is dangerous, and they've known him long enough that he is not the guy they want holding their lives in his hands.
I think their fear takes over.
I imagine that they all know that they're getting the millimeter pension as well.
Right, right.
That's their assumption is that like he's going to do another great purge once he's in power and we're all fucked if we don't.
He has no choice.
They know too much about him.
Right, right.
And it is, it is interesting.
We'll talk about this a little bit at the end, but let me get through the rest of this first.
So the plot to unseat Beria is delayed for a bit by a rebellion in East Germany that they have to crack down on.
But once that calms down after June 1953, plans continue anew.
And this is where Zhukov comes back into it.
It's Zhukov and one of his men, General Kirill Moskalenko.
Since Berry has got this iron grip on the police, right, the military is the only group of guys with guns who you can trust to take him down.
So the plotters, you know, again, this is kind of organized around Khrushchev and Malenkov, gather 10 officers to their banner and in a June 26th meeting at the Presidium, ambush Beria at the start of what is supposed to be a Politburo meeting.
Here's how writer Cheryl Rofer describes what happens next.
Beria, as usual, arrived just before the meeting was to start.
Malenkov changed the agenda to focus specifically on Beria's activities.
This was a complete surprise to Beria.
Malenkov laid out Beria's misdeeds and alleged that Beria had been seeking to displace the collective leadership and to foment discord among Presidium members.
He then proposed a number of possible remedies, all of which included removing Beria from the posts he held.
He invited the other members of the Presidium to join in enumerating Beria's mistakes, which they did.
This put them on record as supporting Beria's removal.
As Malenkov summed up the accusations, he pressed the button to alert the military, who marched into the room.
He then declared that Beria is so cunning and so dangerous that only the devil knows what he might do now.
I therefore propose that we arrest him immediately.
Moskelenko brought out their guns and arrested and searched Beria.
So again, one of the big differences, it's not Zhukov who's there with all the guns showing up in the room to like, it's this other guy who's working with Zhukov.
I think probably just because Zukov doesn't know that it's going to work and is a little bit too canny a survivor to want to put his own neck on Maria right there.
I know which one I like to envision as Oscar Isaac storming in there with an AK.
It's much better in the movie.
And everyone's great in that movie.
I mean, he is having such a good time.
I would never have fucking called, oh, God, what's his name?
The guy who plays Khrushchev.
Steve Buscemi.
Yeah, I would never have called Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, but he is an excellent Khrushchev.
Oh, it's great.
He's really, yeah.
And the guy they got for Molotov, I don't even know what his name is, but he was really good too.
Everybody's great in that movie.
Berry is not killed on the spot, as he is in the movie, but he is arrested and tried on December 10th.
He is executed on December 23rd.
Now, the common view, and the one put forward in Death of Stalin, was that he was the most frightening and evil of the Politburo members, right?
And even his fellow members felt that they had to take action against him.
There's a strong argument to be made that the main thing they feared from Beria was that he was a reformer.
And this gets into, again, some unprovable stuff, but you have to remember, Berry is a guy who believes primarily in his own power.
He is not ideologically committed to communism like a lot of these other guys are.
He's certainly not nearly as much as a guy like Molotov was, right?
And he is open for a lot more reform than other members of the Politburo.
And this is the argument that Amy Knight makes.
Quote: The changes he advocated were so bold and far-reaching that while greeted with relief by the public, they alarmed his colleagues.
Ironically, it was Khrushchev, acclaimed later as a courageous de-Stalinizer, who was chiefly responsible for putting a halt to Beria's reforms by leading the plot against him.
As this biography suggests, Beria's program aimed at undermining the Stalinist system and therefore might have led to its demise.
Khrushchev's policies, while reformist, in fact, perpetuated Stalinism.
Though Khrushchev eliminated the role of police terror, many would argue the system remained essentially totalitarian.
And obviously, that's a deeply debatable point.
I'm not a historian, but I just wanted to note that there is, you know, that is an argument people will make.
I think you could very easily make the argument that it would have been a lot worse if Beria had wound up in charge of the USSR, too.
I think both things can, like, like we've said multiple times, both things can 100% be true because there's a very good chance that there could have been reforms.
But I think, as great as that chance was, the chance was much greater that you would have experienced some form of great purge first.
Right, right.
I think that's that's a solid point.
Now, one thing that I will kind of note here that is interesting is that after they get rid of Beria, there's more purging among the Politburo, right?
Khrushchev is going to do his version of cleaning house, but they stop killing each other, right?
It's almost as if there's this kind of attitude after Berry is gone that, like, anybody who's lived up to this point, I may have to get them out of power.
I may have to like, you know, push him into a country house or something, but like, I don't want to kill any of these guys.
Like, we're all the only ones who made it.
I don't want to like murder these other guys anymore.
Let's stop.
And they do, right?
Khrushchev doesn't massacre all of his, you know, former Politburo colleagues.
And when Khrushchev gets forced out, he's allowed to live, you know?
Right, right.
I wonder, honestly, I'm just curious if Beria would have taken the same turn because maybe he would have seen the point of all the matter.
Because again, he's a practical, efficient person.
Right, right.
Unfortunately, practicality and efficiency devoid of humanity equals just the banality of pure terror and evil, which is what he was.
So, like, it's curious to wonder if he's like, oh, we don't really need to do that anymore.
So, I don't really, I don't really care.
That's the same nothing of what he was doing in his own personal time.
But, you know, yeah, we'll never know.
I think it is possible that like he's more or less, he's not all that different from Khrushchev in terms of like kind of ratcheting down the massacres and stuff.
Maybe.
No way to know.
That's certainly not the argument that Knight makes.
He seems like to me as a guy that saw violence as just a means to an end.
There was no personality or like we said, there's no ideology attached to it.
He's like, well, you know, killing people is the most the quickest way to complete my goal.
And until it isn't, you know, it's not the most efficient way to do it anymore.
So I don't need to do it anymore.
Yeah.
Possibly.
Anyway, Joe, that is the Lavrinti Beria story.
Hopefully, this is helpful, you know, when you become the secret police chief of a country governing roughly one-fifth of the world's land mass.
We all have to have dreams.
I'm glad that I now have to have a dream.
I now have some research material.
Yeah, yeah.
Hopefully, I'll get that other half or one-fifth of the world's land mass, and then we can really start making some nukes.
We can make some form of pact, non-aggression, right?
Right.
Those always end well.
Anyway, I'm going to go hang out with my friend who's helping me organize this plan.
He's really quiet, but very organized.
I think things are going to go great with him.
Seems like a good guy to have in this situation.
Where's tiny glasses, George Knight?
Real smallest glasses you've ever seen in your life.
Anyway, we're done.
Goodbye.
Well, actually, not goodbye.
Joe, you got any pluggables to plug?
I'm the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.
We talk about military history, disasters, horrible things similar to this.
And we've talked about a lot of topics that are vaguely connected to Beria and the Soviet Union during World War II, like the Battle of Kursk, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Winter War, things like that.
Tailgate Podcast Adventures00:02:29
I also write military science fiction, and you can find my newest series, The Undying Legion, wherever it is you cop your books at.
Yeah, check that stuff out.
And, you know, I don't know.
Don't deport people if you can avoid it.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip, just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they hit a BOGO.
Well, then you gotta.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.