400. Stalin: A Poisonous Legacy (Part 6)

Empire: World History

Fiona Hill joins hosts Anita Anand and William Dalrymple to analyze how Vladimir Putin is actively rehabilitating the image of Joseph Stalin t

Key takeaways

• Putin utilizes 'useful history,' such as the imagery of Stalin and Peter the Great, to create a sense of national continuity and victory during the Ukraine war.
• A pattern of high-profile deaths—including Litvinenko, Nemtsov, Navalny, and Prigozhin—serves as a calculated signal that dissenters will be punished.

Main topics

• Stalin's legacy in modern Russia
• Putin's KGB background and manipulation tactics

Notable quotes

He's the ultimate synthesis or synthesizer of Russian history, Soviet history, Soviet power.

Conclusion

The episode provides a chilling look at how an authoritarian leader us

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods, sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there, sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation, and that no longer needed. happen ever again, because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo, it records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards. I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With OnePress, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud. which calls up details of hazy, long-gone conversations in seconds. Empire listeners can go to uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. That's uk.plaud.ai forward slash empire. And use the promo code empire to get 10 % off any Plaud device. Speaker 2 (1:27) Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, Speaker 4 (1:30) William Durrumpal. Speaker 2 (1:32) We've watched a bullied, pockmarked boy become a bank robber, then a bureaucrat, then the master of a sixth of the earth. We've counted the dead in the terror and the famine and the war in the millions. And we have asked all the way through this a question that is not really about the past at all, but about the present. Why? is a man in the Kremlin 70 years after Stalin died, so determined to put him back on the plinth. This isn't just a series about a dead dictator. It's about a country that really can't decide whether the man of steel is a monster or a founding father. In May 2025, a carving of Stalin went back up in the Moscow metro station. It's a replica of one of his successors. torn down years ago. And that image is where we began the whole series. Today, we're really trying to understand the man who wanted to put it back up and how far he is actually modelling himself on the Man of Steel. And Speaker 4 (2:29) to do that, we've got you someone who's actually sat in the room with Vladimir Putin, read him for a living and thought as hard as anyone. about what actually drives him. Our Speaker 2 (2:40) guest is Fiona Hill. She grew up the daughter of a coal miner in County Durham. She learned Russian. She turned herself into one of the sharpest readers of the Kremlin in the world. She was a national intelligence officer on Russia, then the most senior Russia advisor on the American National Security Council. And she wrote with Clifford Gaddy the book many people reach for first when they want to understand this president. It's called Mr. Putin. operative in the Kremlin. Fiona, welcome to Empire. In your long list of accolades, I forgot to mention, you are now also Chancellor at Durham, so you get to wear a fancy hat and do fancy things. I do indeed. No, thank you so Speaker 1 (3:17) much for having me here. It's great to be here with you. First Speaker 2 (3:20) of all... I mean, are we making too much of this? And when you read the Kremlin, do you see that there is this resurgence of Stalin? I Speaker 1 (3:28) do. And you're not reading too much into it. I mean, what is interesting about this is that Putin has tried on the garb and the image of many other Russian, Soviet, imperial leaders for size. And I guess Stalin is the latest, the latest of the emperor's new clothes. If we look back to earlier periods, he's gone through czarist ministers like... Stolypin, who at one point was Prime Minister of the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II. So before the Russian Revolution, he was the great reformer. This was in an early phase of Putin's presidency. Stolypin, rather unfortunately, met his demise with an assassination in the Kiev Opera House just before the revolution. So you can imagine that his end was not really the one that Putin was wanting to associate himself with. But at various points, he's extolled the virtues of the greats, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander the Great, who was again another reformer who emancipated the serfs. And I think it's very interesting, very telling that he's gone back to Stalin, who wasn't somebody who was in that original pantheon, as he has become more and more embroiled. in the war in Ukraine, because of course, Stalin's association for many people, and obviously in this case for Putin, is with victory. He was the winner in World War II, the Great Fatherland War, which Putin has tried to make linkages with in terms of the war in Ukraine. The thing is though, the thing I find Speaker 2 (5:02) weird about all of this is that there is not a family that hasn't been touched either by the famine, the terror, the gulags. How is this sort of national amnesia working where people find it okay or are you getting the idea that actually people are chafing under these big statues and you know this sort of resurgence of Stalin's name? Look Speaker 1 (5:22) I think every society suffers from historical amnesia and Putin at one point in one of the many meetings that I was present in where he was speaking was asked a question by a British journalist. about Lenin, for example, and why Lenin had never been removed from the mausoleum on Red Square. Putin immediately shot back and said to this British journalist, well, hang on, you're from the United Kingdom, aren't you? What about Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell? Oliver Cromwell's statue is still outside of the Houses of Parliament, said Putin. It's quite a sharp response. It was a very sharp response. And I was like, gosh, that's kind of clever. Did he kind of, you know, do this, a little bit of research on this in advance? And he said, who was the worst butcher, Lenin or Cromwell? That's a good question. And actually, you know, it'd probably be hard to respond to that, wouldn't it? Ask the Speaker 4 (6:08) Irish. They might come with a surprising answer. Yeah. Yeah, Speaker 1 (6:11) exactly. And I think that Stalin for Putin falls into that category. He's part of useful history, a very useful history. A lot of people have forgotten or maybe sometimes didn't know given their age. I mean, Putin's already been in power for 25 years. And the people who have memories of Stalin going back to the 1940s and 1950s are either very old or they're all dead. And those stories have not necessarily been passed down in recent time. So I think that Putin can use Stalin as an iconic figure. and is more confident that he can reshape the narrative about Stalin, or the image of Stalin that he's trying to use. Just as Oliver Cromwell, as he rightly said, still stands outside of the House of Parliament, seen as the father of Parliament, rather than the butcher of, you know, where do we begin? Ireland, Scotland, you know, lots of England, and the person who decapitated a king. What Speaker 4 (7:03) do you think also about this remark that he says, that the excessive demonization of Stalin? is one of the means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia. Do you think that's a genuinely felt feeling from him? Speaker 1 (7:15) No, that's a sentiment that he's expressing as a justification for what he's actually doing. I mean, it's a classic going right back at your accuser, just like this amazing exchange that he'd had with this British journalist, and basically putting on to everybody else, well, look. You would, of course, criticize Stalin because he's a symbol of the greatness of the Soviet Union in the peak of its power, or at least the peak of its perceived power in being one of the victors of World War II, which, of course, established the United States as a global power. And he's using that, as I said, just very astutely, one might say, but also pretty cynically as a way of pushing back anybody who might be protesting about Stalin's restoration. Speaker 2 (8:01) There's pushing back and then there's also reprogramming. I was really interested in this rewriting of the one compulsory history textbook that every child in Russia has to read. This is August 2023. And it was written by Putin's close ally, Vladimir Medinsky. Now, among the things that it says is, you know, the terror is pretty much a footnote. Stalin describes, we did this in the first episode in the series, a pragmatic... manager. Now, what do you make of sort of reprogramming history in the minds of young people? And what do you see as the effect that's having in the last three years? Well, Speaker 1 (8:40) look, this is something that so many states indulge in. I mean, I'm sitting talking to you in Washington, DC, where we've just gone through a bizarre celebration. terms of some of the things that happened here in Washington itself, in the capital, the 250th anniversary of the United States and of the Declaration of Independence. And there was a lot of reprogramming going on, including a fight on the the White House lawn, a really bizarre version of a state fair, and all kinds of reprogramming, repositioning of previous United States presidents who wouldn't have been seen in the same light as they are now from the vantage point of the president, President Trump. This is all useful history, and it's what you make use of it. And as I've said already, Putin has reprogrammed Pyotr Stolypin. He's reprogrammed Catherine the Great. He's reprogrammed Peter the Great. And Stalin, there's just a lot to reprogram, obviously, given the extent of the crimes of Stalin that we learned in 1956 and onwards after Khrushchev's famous secret speech. But it's also that he's refitted and reprogrammed for a time of war. Because the whole idea of Putin is that Russia is facing down, just as the Soviet Union was facing down, the entirety of NATO Western forces once again, like Napoleon or like Nazi Germany before them, trying to bring Russia, the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire. down to its knees. So I think this is just a classic trope. It's the kind of thing that we see in history over and over again. If you look actually at Russian imperial history, As you've talked about many times in various episodes or the episodes in other empires, this is the kind of thing that we often see when a system is somewhat in trouble or is wanting to convey something different to its citizenry. Under the Tsars, under Nicholas II, for example, they did something similar. They went back into the grab bag of former imperial Russian history and tried to give themselves a kind of fresh look, knowing that they were in big trouble in the run-up to the a revolution. It's not just Stalin that Putin has taken on board, it's also the Russian Orthodox Church. And Stalin, the Russian Orthodox Church, weren't exactly on particularly friendly terms, given Stalin's background. Speaker 4 (11:08) I love those pictures of Putin diving into icy water with archbishops sort of reviving him as he comes up. He's fully into all that sort of thing. Speaker 1 (11:16) He certainly is. It's just whatever is a good symbol of the state that he can use and something that exudes and transmits a sense of power. And when Putin was asked about the Orthodox Church, for example, he complained that the Bolsheviks had got rid of it. rid of it, because he said it was a very useful source of power for strengthening the state. So that's how we see Stalin. And Stalin created a whole secular religion or religious cult, in effect, around himself. And Putin is using that same religious cult or quasi-religious cult for himself. And Speaker 4 (11:49) the same is true sort of in reverse, isn't it? That people who are memorialising his victims, indeed, this human rights organisation memorial, specifically. gets closed down as regarded as anti-national, as somehow detracting from the state. I Speaker 1 (12:06) mean, that's exactly the case that, you know, yesterday's victims become today's threats to the system. The very people that you were trying to link arms with in the past because that was part of the policy of that present. is now no longer useful for you. For people like Yeltsin, before him for Gorbachev, and actually initially for Putin himself, who was actually even seen in the company of the head of Memorial, Ludmila Alexeevna, at various points, it was useful to commemorate and try to embrace the victims. He himself, his own family, their run-ins with Stalin, one of his grandparents, grandfathers, was a cook. for Stalin and probably