The Truth about Communism, Gulags and the Left with Giles Udy
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 16 minutes
Words per Minute
178.49467
Summary
Giles Udy is a British historian and author of Labour and the Gulags: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left. He has spent the last 15 years living in a Soviet prison camp. In this episode, he tells us about his experience in the Gulag camp, and the impact it had on his life and the lives of other prisoners.
Transcript
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They would lock people in there. The doors were studied just like a cheese grater.
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No, no food hole. Studied just like a cheese grater.
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Reason being, you want to bang on the door, say, please let me out.
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I just thought, what is the refinement of cruelty that enables you to design something like this?
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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We are delighted to have a brilliant guest for you today.
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He's a British historian and the author of Labour and the Gulags, Russia and the Seduction of the British Left.
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It's good to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.
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Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you on. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
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For anyone who's unfamiliar with you, your story, your work, tell everybody a little bit about who are you,
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how are you, where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
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Well, I had a probably conventional middle class background.
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I was shipped off to boarding school, spent 10 years there, messed up most of my time at school,
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flunked my A-levels, got to uni, thrown out of uni for not working hard enough when I just kind of drifted.
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I ended up by working in the shipping industry for quite a while.
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And I'd done a number of things over the years.
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A bit of this, I was helping to set up a business with someone.
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And then I spent some years in construction building.
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And then about 20 years ago, I happened to take part in a trip to Russia.
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And I didn't know because, actually, I didn't really want to go by the end and I almost ducked out.
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I didn't know it was going to be, you know, the thing that changed the whole course of my life, the whole direction.
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And we were going with a party of people who were helping after the fall of communism just to rebuild independent churches.
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Because, of course, one of the pillars of civil society had been completely ripped out under communism.
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It was basically illegal to worship in a church.
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I was just helping with a conference, you know, hanging around at the back, talking to people.
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And I thought, this is astonishing that any people can go through this kind of suffering for decade after decade after decade.
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The level of repression, the dictatorship, the fear, the deaths.
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And I was just, you know, how can you meet people today who've been through all of that or their parents have or, you know, in those days you could sit around a table in Russia with a group of just ordinary people my age.
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And you'd say, so do any of you have any experience of the gulag era and of, you know, repression and what's happened to your family?
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And some would say, oh, yeah, my grandpa's brother was shot.
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Yeah, well, my grandparents, they were in the camps.
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Oh, and one chap I remember saying to me, oh, yeah, Stalin wiped out half my family.
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And you'd go around a table and maybe a third of the people there would have some story like that in their family background, fairly immediate family background.
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And, of course, too, the thing about those things is, you know, you've got somebody who's been in a prison camp, a Soviet prison camp for 15 years.
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So they have their own family or they have their own children.
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And then it kind of goes on through the generations.
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Anyway, I was in this I was in this this conference and I happened to make contact with with some people who they came from and this northern city way, way high up above the Arctic Circle.
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If you take a straight line from Afghanistan and you go all the way up to the Arctic Circle, then go 300 miles north and you get to this crazy city in the middle of nowhere called Narylsk.
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And it sits on one third of the world's reserves of Dickel.
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And I just got fascinated because it was one of the big, nasty gulag centers.
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There were maybe four or five really, really horrible camp complexes, you know, multiple camps.
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But I mean, this one was so isolated and I just got fascinated by the story of it.
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And I got them eventually to be able to get me in.
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And I'll come to that very, very briefly in a minute.
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But anyway, I just I got I got transfixed by this story.
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This was this is a city that is 300 miles above the Arctic Circle.
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Temperature goes down to minus 50 in the winter.
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Right now, they've just got two hours of sunshine and they'll go through six weeks of dark.
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And then you get to the summer and it's bright sunshine.
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I remember sitting on the top of the of the nearest mountain, 1130 at night in bright sunshine.
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I mean, the sun by then just goes round in a circle all the way around and doesn't stop.
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But as I discovered more and more about the city and its history and I I just thought, oh, wow, there's a story to be told here.
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But because so many different groups of people over the 20 years or so that it was in existence, 20, 30.
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So many different groups of people have been there.
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Russian prisoners of war, Red Army prisoners of war who just been dumped there.
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A lot of Ukrainian nationalists towards the end, Baltic people, old Bolsheviks, comrades of Lenin from the old days, those ones that hadn't been shot.
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And I just thought there's so many stories here.
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I've got to I've got to I've got to dig deeper.
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And I managed to get in the the first year I couldn't get in.
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The first year I thought I bet then I'd been reading so many memoirs.
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So I thought I need I need to follow the path of the prisoners.
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I need to understand what it was like, a little bit of what they do.
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So I flew out to sort of the geographical center of Russia, Krasnoyeusk, which is right in the middle of Siberia.
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I mean, my Russian friends think I was crazy to do it.
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And it was a thousand mile journey north on this river.
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So then you've got nothing except for the river.
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And then that freezes from maybe October, November through till April.
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And then these little villages, they're all isolated.
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But I knew the stories, even of the people who had been deported to those villages.
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And, you know, so we just we go all the way north and pass some of these places.
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And, you know, it was an extraordinarily moving thing.
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We're in the middle of this river, which is a mile wide at that stage.
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And you just see this big blue cross among the trees on the side.
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You know, it shivers down my spine even when I'm talking about it.
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But it just so happened the guy I'd made contact with ran the local telephone company.
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And he had enough clout with the FSB, with the police, to be able to get me a permit.
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And I flew in from Moscow, and all the passengers were allowed to leave from the airplane.
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And then the police arrived to escort me on a military jeep through to the airport police station.
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And I was held there until these guys, who I'd never met before, but just said,
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Because Russians are actually very, very welcoming people.
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And the idea that anyone wanted to come from the mainland, as they'd call it, to this isolated place,
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they just thought it was just great, you know, come on, please, we'd love to have you.
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I can't remember, because it was quite a while ago.
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But they took me round to what still remained of these old camps.
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It's a strange place, because there's an immense amount of pride there today.
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But at the same time as I went there, it was voted one of the 10 most polluted cities on Earth.
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You know, you come out of your flat in the morning, because they let me stay in a flat,
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and they've got a refining factory that refines nickel at one end of the city,
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and then they've got a refining factory that refines copper at the other end of the city.
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And they'd come out in the morning and go, ah, yeah, Windsor West, that's a copper factory.
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And, I mean, some of them were just, I think the one that struck me most was they took me to a little outlying settlement.
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There's 120,000 people live in this city still, but you can walk across it in 20 minutes,
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because it's just basically blocks of flats, and then huge mines, and then some outlying townships.
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And there in the rubbish dump, there was this concrete construction.
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And what it was, it was the remnants of a punishment cell block inside a punishment camp.
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Now, minor infractions or major infractions, you went into punishment camp.
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They had you working in the quarries, brutal conditions, run by convicts, just like the Nazi prison camps were run by capos.
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And because it was built in concrete, it still survived.
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And you went in, and, you know, one cell I remember was a single cell.
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And there was a bar door, and then an outer door.
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The rule for punishment camp blocks was that they took your clothes at the beginning of the day,
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and you were allowed back to sleep in them at night.
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But then down on one corridor, the main corridor, the cells were open.
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Now, I said, let's go down to minus 50 in this place.
00:11:01.260
The cells were open, and they would lock people in there.
00:11:05.620
The doors were studied just like a cheese grater.
00:11:13.320
Reason being, you want to bang on the door, say, please let me out.
00:11:19.660
I just thought, what is the refinement of cruelty that enables you to design something like this
00:11:27.520
and put it in as part of the process in which you repress people?
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But the long and the short of it was that I came back, and I went back there a couple of times more,
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And I think probably then after a few years, you know, I said, I want to write the story of the city.
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I want to write the story of the people who've been there.
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I want to write the story of where they come from.
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Do you know that the Latvian officer corps, when the Soviets took over Latvia,
00:12:01.460
they were marched out into a forest for joint exercises one day,
00:12:08.960
Now, this place from where they were was further from Cairo to Durban,
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never knowing whether their family would ever know what had happened to them.
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Anyway, I said to my friends, I want to write this story.
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And then I was doing a little bit of research, and I came across some newspaper cuttings of the times.
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In those days, they used to produce what had been in Parliament the day before.
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And they were talking about this problem there was with timber imported from the White Sea region.
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And it was actually bishops in the House of Lords trying to persuade the government to do something about it.
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And another story took me off for the next 15 years, which is what actually became my book.
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And that was discovering that in 1930, Stalin deported one and a half to 1.8 million land,
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And kids learn about it in school nowadays, but they just know the number, right?
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And 250,000 of them were all sent up to this really, really isolated place, again, really cold, just subarctic,
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just all the way around the White Sea, which is the sea that is in between northern Russia and Finland.
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Charles, I'm going to interrupt you very briefly, only to add that when you say the word deported,
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most people in the West imagine someone being sent to a different country.
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But what you mean when you say deported, these are people in the Soviet Union who were taken from their small landholding,
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as my family were in Ukraine, and sent to this Siberian remote camp for the crime of having property.
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For the crime of having property, because property had already been banned under the 1980 Soviet,
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It had been banned under the 1980 constitution.
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But until Stalin came to power, he hadn't actually got the power to really bring that into being.
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And these people, they had lived in these villages, you know, probably knowing nothing outside the village.
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Very primitive life, surviving just hand to mouth, one cow, one pig, whatever, having possession of machinery.
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A sewing machine was sufficient to get you picked up.
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And they would be taken just at a few hours' notice, not knowing what was going to happen.
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Soldiers would just turn up, take them, and then they'd be put on a cattle truck in whatever clothes they had.
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And the north was so isolated, it wasn't ready to receive any of these people at a year's notice, let alone a few weeks.
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And so they were then just thrown out into the snow.
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The conditions in the camps they were in were just appalling.
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Some of these kids, I've got photographs of kids who did not even have shoes, goes down to minus 20 in the winter.
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Well, one Soviet official actually wrote reports back to Moscow and said, this is an absolutely ghastly situation.
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We've got hundreds of people somewhere else all relying on a water supply from one well.
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He was eventually shipped off to the camps, and I think he was shot a few years later.
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So by the end of the first year, maybe 21,000, because disease and malnutrition, they went hand in hand.
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Of that 250,000 sent up there, maybe 21,000 were dead by the end of the first year.
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They were sent up there to earn foreign currency by cutting timber for the export trade.
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And we in Great Britain were the biggest customer.
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It was about 500 million pounds worth at today's prices.
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Others managed to escape over the Finnish border, actually slogging their way through the forest.
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And then they gave signed affidavits to diplomats in Helsinki.
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But it just so happened we just got our second Labour government.
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And the whole history, as I was later to discover, the whole history of the Labour Party in the interwar years is one really of believing that Stalin, Lenin first and then Stalin, were creating the utopian state.
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And so what happened is this massive campaign started.
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But two, three hundred meetings up and down the country in the first year.
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A massive rally with 5,000 people in the Albert Hall to launch it.
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We don't talk about it now because it's just one of those things that doesn't interest the historians who are looking at that period.
00:17:09.280
Their idea of a protest was a day of prayer, right?
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It was joined in by a million people around the globe.
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Biggest protest against Soviet communism in history right until the fall of communism.
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In St. Peter's Square in Rome, 50,000 people gathered on a Wednesday for a mass.
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That's kind of the way people looked at church and religion in those days.
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Well, the Labour government did not want to know.
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They knew what was going on because they've seen the reports that came through.
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But they either denied them or they were eventually pressed to have an inquiry.
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And the Foreign Secretary told the Cabinet, he said, if we do have an inquiry, it's going to show that forced labour is being used.
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And we can't do that because it might affect our trade elsewhere in the empire.
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Actually, I've got the papers of the people from the trade ministry, the Board of Trade, advising him beforehand that isn't going to be a problem.
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So then they sent their spokesman to the parliament just about a week later.
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And there they denied that there was any evidence for what was going on.
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A week before in Cabinet, they'd actually been talking about how the Russian stowaways didn't want to get sent back because they thought they were going to be shot.
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And the Home Secretary said, I think they're right, they will be.
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And then and eventually, eventually the Conservatives, you know, it's funny.
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We talk about how unrepresentative the House of Lords was.
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But the Labour Party had the majority in the House of Commons.
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So they blocked every single possible possibility of a debate.
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It was in the House of Lords that all this agitation was going on.
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And really, I mean, I don't know what I think about the House of Lords today, but that's a fascinating challenge because they were the only people that were sticking up for the best part of one and a half million working class Soviet citizens who were oppressed by their leadership.
00:19:10.800
The privileged House of Lords and Anglican bishops.
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And so the Conservatives managed to shoehorn the subject into one debate.
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And we had one Labour MP, George Strauss, public school educated, like so many were in those days.
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I mean, the deputy minister in the Foreign Office was an old Etonian.
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George Strauss, he said, oh, no, no, he said, well, there may be there may be Labour camps going on, but conditions in Russian prisons are much better than in British prisons.
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And then, you know, the the cream on the cake, the government statement by a guy called I think it was George Graham.
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Um, he died, actually flew poor guy, but otherwise he'd have been a real high flyer.
00:20:02.740
So he he concluded the debate for the government.
00:20:06.060
And he said, um, the Soviets are conducting a very interesting economic experiment.
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1.8 million people torn off their land at a few moments notice.
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The Soviets are conducting a very interesting social experiment, economic experiment and deserve to be allowed to continue without outside interference.
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Indeed, we will give them whatever support they need.
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And I read that in Hansard and I just I couldn't believe it.
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I've now spent, you know, four or five, six years digging through records.
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How could a British government actually take that stance?
00:20:45.680
I mean, we don't have a lot of faith in most governments.
00:20:48.460
We're always thinking something's, you know, that they're incompetent.
00:20:54.280
He knew I saw all the kind of documents that were getting sent to him.
00:21:05.160
So that took me on another little rabbit trail, which just ended up by meaning that my book was finally about 600 pages long or more.
00:21:11.180
Because I thought, how is it that we get to that in 1931?
00:21:19.820
What is it that was going on in the years before?
00:21:24.080
And how could people actually look at what was going on in Russia?
00:21:36.100
I mean, for goodness sake, these people shot their royal family, men, women and children.
00:21:45.560
And so then I just dug in and worked my way through all sorts of stuff.
00:21:51.880
And I couldn't believe that people could be so consistently praising a really evil regime.
00:22:04.320
And just refusing to see the stuff that was going on that was wrong.
00:22:09.040
Because they believed that Lenin first and then Stalin was building the great communist utopia.
00:22:16.880
And we see this again and again through the history of the Labour Party.
00:22:24.360
Well, you'd know all about it then, wouldn't you?
00:22:25.740
So I saw them all praising Chavez and you saw Owen Jones and Corbyn.
00:22:30.220
And at that time, my cousin, who was a journalist, was telling me that Chavez's thugs were turning up at television stations
00:22:37.140
saying to journalists, if you carry on criticizing the government,
00:22:41.280
you're going to feel an unpleasant force around the back of your head.
00:22:45.200
But the entire Labour government were praising it
00:22:47.500
and saying that Venezuela was going to be the new socialist paradise.
00:22:50.860
I came across a newspaper cutting just yesterday, actually.
00:22:53.760
I don't know why it came up on my phone, which was exactly that.
00:22:56.780
That was a letter that Jeremy Corbyn and others wrote.
00:23:00.920
Tariq Ali, Tony Benn signed it way back, commending Chavez for closing down a TV station.
00:23:17.020
I mean, the guy who became the Labour Party chairman in 1946 was a man called Harold Lasky.
00:23:28.140
He was professor of political science at the London School of Economics.
00:23:32.820
He was probably one of the two or three leading Labour intellectuals right the way through in the period
00:23:41.900
Now, 1946, he actually he was he was praising the Soviet Union and saying,
00:23:51.600
we quite understand that it is not a free society,
00:23:55.900
but we recognise the reason why the Soviet government needs to impose these controls.
00:24:02.540
And let's be clear, I'm just I'm really, really enjoying listening to you.
00:24:09.060
And I'm struggling emotionally because it's difficult for me because all of these places you talk about.
00:24:19.800
They weren't there because they were in a camp or anything.
00:24:24.520
And it was a very they told stories about how obviously there's no vegetables, there's no fruit.
00:24:29.520
So you're not getting vitamin C is very difficult.
00:24:36.660
They're built on metal stilts that have to be rammed into the permafrost.
00:24:40.880
And my family, my mother's family, they were Kulaks and their crime was they had a horse.
00:24:48.160
Imagine just if one horse for people listening to this, imagine you have your house and you happen to have a horse and some chickens and whatever.
00:25:05.500
And my grandmother, still alive, 95, living in Ukraine.
00:25:09.380
And she remembers her little brother starving to death on the way.
00:25:15.700
And this is what happened to millions of people.
00:25:28.140
And we're just talking about one group, the Kulaks, right?
00:25:31.440
Because then you add to it, you talked about prisoners of war.
00:25:36.880
What happened was you went to fight for your country.
00:25:39.980
You went to defend the Soviet Union against the Nazi invasion.
00:25:45.900
And there's a disincentive to being taken prisoner to encourage you to fight for your country.
00:25:51.280
If you came back after having been captured by the Germans, what happened to you?
00:26:00.660
Or shot, depending on what the circumstances are.
00:26:02.660
They shot 150,000 of their own people for military crimes during the war.
00:26:07.540
150,000 of your own soldiers shot by your side.
00:26:13.480
And, you know, down my father's side, my grandmother was born in the Gulag.
00:26:22.580
Can we just, let's give people some figures and some big picture stuff, first of all.
00:26:27.540
Do you know the total number of people who were sent into the system?
00:26:32.400
The best part of 18 million people were actually arrested individually and sent to Gulag camps.
00:26:42.320
The other form of arrest would be by administrative order.
00:26:46.320
Basically, an order was given, go and round up all of that area, that city, whatever, or that
00:26:52.320
ethnic group, particularly like in Crimea or people who'd come over with the original Germans
00:26:59.540
And they were just deported right to the wilds of Kazakhstan.
00:27:06.400
So, for there, you've got maybe 6 million deported.
00:27:10.940
And by the time you round off the figure, it's about 28 million people who were put under some
00:27:19.120
form of military imprisonment, under guard or some sort.
00:27:28.940
And if you're going to talk about the population in Russia at the time, somewhere between 1 in
00:27:34.400
And of those, we are sure that about 2.75 million died.
00:27:44.420
If you talk about what happened to the people who were just deported en masse, it's about
00:27:52.120
So, you're talking 6 million deported, men, women, children, and maybe a million don't
00:27:58.620
And for the rest, they're not allowed back for decades.
00:28:01.100
You know, way after Stalin, they're still trying to get their homes.
00:28:08.500
And, you know, now that, well, we won't talk about modern history yet because you can get
00:28:17.620
And then in the year 1937 to 1938, the big, the great terror, the NKVD secret police figures
00:28:38.620
They had different initials right the way through the history.
00:28:47.660
And it's really hard to get a grasp of what that figure is.
00:28:51.180
But it just so happened that this summer, and you can look it up online and see it, they
00:28:58.780
created a monument in Washington to all the Americans who died in COVID up until that time.
00:29:13.780
Great big wide angle shot of all these flags, this whole sea of flags.
00:29:23.880
And when you see that photograph, then it really brings it home, really brings it home.
00:29:30.100
And Giles, I have this experience of talking to people here in the West.
00:29:32.980
I remember my grandmother, she had very close friends here who loved her very much, actually
00:29:40.840
And whenever she told them her story about her family, they always said, yeah, but why
00:29:49.240
Well, I think it's very difficult to imagine this sort of evil on this scale without thinking
00:29:54.520
that, well, these people at some level have done something.
00:30:02.840
I think you probably have to go back to Marxism originally to see the really low value that
00:30:11.320
Humanity was considered by Marx just really as a mass.
00:30:13.820
And for the sake of building the state, anything went.
00:30:19.780
I mean, he's quite clear in the Communist Manifesto, quite clear that all morality is,
00:30:31.860
Well, eternal values are kind of the ones that just come from the Bible.
00:30:34.380
You know, you can't, you shouldn't kill, you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't do all
00:30:37.680
And then what they then reconfigured it as is morality.
00:30:46.700
So by the time you've actually just literally abandoned every moral constraint, it justifies
00:30:52.940
any action for the sake of building the utopia.
00:30:56.640
Because the Marxist idea is that there is indeed a utopia we can build.
00:31:02.220
History has shown a series of conflicts between the classes and now we're on the last one.
00:31:10.400
And the last one is the proletarian versus the bourgeois, the capitalist.
00:31:15.540
And when that conflict actually breaks out into open warfare, as it must do, and the proletarians
00:31:23.120
rise up and deprive the capitalists, the bourgeois, of all their property and taken under their
00:31:28.520
ownership first, and that it goes to the state, then we'll enter this kind of heaven on earth.
00:31:33.100
I mean, Marx even used the phrase heaven on earth.
00:31:46.560
And once they had the vision, you can't really back out.
00:31:52.840
Once you thrust the first bayonet in, in the cause of that, you can't take a step back.
00:31:59.960
And so they had this idea that everything needs to be taken under the control of the state,
00:32:10.880
But then coupled with that, there was the possibility of any counter-revolution, of anyone
00:32:18.520
And if you're going to impose this total control, which you believe is eventually going to somehow
00:32:23.940
morph into this wonderful period when crime is gone, and everyone lives happily, and we
00:32:29.920
all just share stuff because we want to, and no one hoards.
00:32:33.960
If you're gripped by this, then it's just a logical step to make sure that you get rid of
00:32:44.280
every person who might oppose it, every person who might oppose you.
00:32:49.780
And if you're Stalin, then it's not just the people who clearly are still part of the old regime,
00:32:55.800
because most of them have been killed or got rid of anyway, the aristocrats.
00:32:58.920
It's now people who might dispute you as being the person who could lead.
00:33:04.760
I mean, Stalin killed so many of his colleagues.
00:33:07.860
You know, there's one communist convention, if you like, that they were all at.
00:33:10.720
And you see the list of the high proportion that were just shot in the years afterwards.
00:33:16.120
But so there's about four purposes behind all this repression.
00:33:20.180
The first was to punish those who really were the enemies of the state, very few of them,
00:33:25.300
or were imagined to be the enemies of the state.
00:33:27.480
To terrorize the rest into compliance and to use that slave labor.
00:33:33.600
And it really was slave labor to build a new society, because if anything goes, then people are just marshaled.
00:33:45.400
Well, well, and in the case of Nurelsk, where these sits on one third of the world's reserve nickel.
00:33:51.140
And 98% of the world's platinum metals as well, by the way.
00:34:01.980
But nickel, I mean, you know, you strengthen tank armor with nickel.
00:34:12.280
In the case of Nurelsk, it is so isolated, they couldn't mine it unless they had slave labor to do it.
00:34:20.900
And then they realized they needed geologists, they needed scientists.
00:34:24.720
So they just went up and arrested a whole lot of geologists.
00:34:27.340
And then they shipped them up there, officially as prisoners, but in practice, just scientists.
00:34:35.060
Or was he just a power-hungry maniac who had megalomaniacal tendencies?
00:34:42.460
It would be really nice to think that it was, because then you could kind of excuse it.
00:34:45.980
And then you could also kind of just bypass the consequences of, wow, if one person can do that, if one state can do that, if one man can bring on board hundreds of thousands to actually sign up to this cause and believe it's totally fine for you to punish people in that punishment camp, I told.
00:35:09.980
He was very, very well versed in Lenin and Marx.
00:35:17.780
And as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you know, the great author of the Communist Manifesto, has said, Stalin didn't do anything.
00:35:24.920
Or the Gulag Archipelago, not the Communist Manifesto.
00:35:27.900
That is quite a slanderous statement right there, Giles.
00:35:31.900
Yeah, you see, I'm just thinking, I'm already thinking too far ahead.
00:35:37.140
Now, I like to stay off Marx if I can, as long as I can for most of my life.
00:35:42.260
Yeah, the Gulag Archipelago, an astonishing, astonishing book.
00:35:46.020
And it's now in one volume, which Jordan Peterson has actually done the introduction for.
00:35:53.160
But, yeah, Stalin, that's where we were before I made that little mistake.
00:35:58.220
If you go back to Stalin, as far as Solzhenitsyn was concerned, Stalin didn't make, did do anything that Lenin hadn't already started.
00:36:11.640
Lenin ordered that the regime's opponents would be locked up in a concentration camp.
00:36:16.760
And up in one concentration camp, up near the Archanjosk, on the White Sea, Archangel as we know it, there was an old monastery.
00:36:27.460
They tended to use monasteries because they'd probably imprisoned or shot most of the inmates.
00:36:33.540
There was one monastery, Chalmaguri, where over the early two, three, four years, just after the revolution, they shot 25,000 people there.
00:36:44.440
The rest were all slave labor camps, for the most part.
00:36:49.780
But Lenin then issued an order, you know, within two years of the revolution, that every single city should have a Gulag camp, a concentration camp, which could hold 300 inmates.
00:37:02.340
So within a few years, there were 70,000 or so in camps around the place.
00:37:06.420
And then this extraordinary island, the Solovetsky Islands, group of islands in the middle of the White Sea, really became what, again, Solzhenitsyn called the first cancerous tumor that metastasized to be the Gulag archipelago.
00:37:22.140
But by 1929, 1930, there were maybe 60,000 prisoners there.
00:37:28.040
Stalin had just come to power, and that was when he really established the Gulag system on an official basis and gave it entirely to the secret police.
00:37:37.320
It had been under kind of dual management before, entirely to the secret police, and then they just expanded it from there.
00:37:46.680
I always think about this question, which is, why are we never taught this?
00:37:52.960
Why is it that the Nazi swastika is deservedly seen as a horrendous symbol of evil and of oppression, but the hammer and sickle, people just shrug their shoulders?
00:38:07.020
It's interesting, actually, just on that point, we do a Raw show where we joke about the events of the day, and for that we bought a Soviet hat, a sort of South American or Central American revolutionary hat with the star on it, and a German hat as well.
00:38:26.400
And the day that we bought it, Francis had a comedy gig that he was going to, and I gave him the South American hat, and he just put it on and walked outside and went to his gig, sort of for a joke between us.
00:38:38.360
If I wear my Russian nushanker with the Soviet star, no one would give a damn.
00:38:53.200
As far as the British left were concerned between the wars, everything Soviet was good.
00:38:58.420
You know, the spy Antony Blunt, who was later on revealed, he went up, he was in Cambridge in the early 30s.
00:39:04.060
He arrived in Cambridge, he had to leave for a term, he was going off studying somewhere.
00:39:08.480
He came back, he said, when I came back to university, everyone had become communist.
00:39:14.300
It was cool then, it was cool when I was at school.
00:39:16.880
Because most people haven't the faintest idea what it means.
00:39:21.520
They just think it's something warm and we're all going to share and whatever else.
00:39:27.540
So as far as the communism is concerned, leaving aside the Soviet symbols, as far as the communism is concerned, people do not know.
00:39:40.280
You know, you say, oh, communists want to abolish the family.
00:39:46.020
Abolition of the family, abolition of all property ownership, all property ownership.
00:39:57.400
If you were actually trying to set up a private business, throw you into prison.
00:40:00.220
Well, that was a crime under the Soviet statute, yeah.
00:40:02.800
So abolition of property, abolition of the family, abolition of religion, big, big, big one, and abolition of morality.
00:40:16.900
And I feel you've kind of got to go up to a Trotskyite today and say, do you want to do that?
00:40:21.100
Do you believe, as Marx said and as Trotsky endorsed, the only way to transform society is by violent revolution?
00:40:34.700
You know, violence is the midwife of the new society.
00:40:41.460
You need to ask these people, do you really believe that?
00:40:45.740
Because that's what these people, you supposedly follow, are actually preaching.
00:40:58.200
I got stuck in Wales for eight weeks, which was really pretty remarkable.
00:41:02.780
And I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
00:41:04.300
And I'm 80% finished on a book on exactly this stuff.
00:41:08.600
There's about 300 different quotes from Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky.
00:41:12.740
And it's just written to say, this is what it is.
00:41:22.060
And socialism is well different, no, to a Marxist.
00:41:33.560
And they say, let's keep the capitalist system, but let's temper it to make sure it's fair to the disadvantaged.
00:41:52.120
Well, but Jeremy Corbyn wasn't suggesting putting people in gulags, was he?
00:41:56.360
But that's where people in his situation need to be confronted.
00:42:03.580
He said, Marx's philosophy and his insights are really brilliant.
00:42:07.920
Well, OK, his insights are the only way to transform society is through violent revolution.
00:42:21.020
And I think that's why some people, as far as communism is concerned, actually say, oh, yeah, yeah, it's great.
00:42:31.420
We're all going to digress into what actually happened when they really did try and do something in the kibbutz system in Israel.
00:42:38.060
Because, you know, the kibbutzes were set up to actually work out a little local version of communism.
00:42:47.120
But then it got to the stage where nobody wanted to take the garbage out.
00:42:50.320
And they then started employing outsiders to do the dirty jobs.
00:42:56.040
Everyone was meant to be doing everything equally.
00:42:57.700
But there were actually things they didn't want to do.
00:43:01.540
And then the kids were all shipped off to communal quarters and taken away from the family.
00:43:07.840
Because, I mean, I could go up on a rabbit trail.
00:43:12.920
But when you read what the Soviets talked about as far as education and children, we need to nationalize children, said one communist leader's wife.
00:43:22.140
We need to take them away from the harmful influence of the family.
00:43:24.900
I mean, I read those bits and I get angry because I really do think it's so inhuman.
00:43:33.540
And then the women didn't like having communal clothing.
00:43:35.660
They didn't like wearing clothes and then putting them back into the communal wash house and then just being given something that was at whatever their size.
00:43:42.500
And, you know, those ordinary human things, you can't marshal people en masse, just doesn't work.
00:43:58.220
The idea of the communist utopia is that there'll be no freeloaders.
00:44:01.020
Everyone will automatically just have so much philanthropy in their hearts.
00:44:08.200
You know, crime, according to Marx, comes only because people are warped by the possession of private property by others.
00:44:17.020
And the moment nobody owns private property, then crime will disappear.
00:44:21.460
Well, we know that that's just, you know, it's counterintuitive.
00:44:27.260
You know, Charles, I've lived in many different places.
00:44:30.120
Ironically, I would say the Soviet Union, even in my childhood, which was in the 80s, was the most doggy dog.
00:44:42.100
We're all, in Russian we say, we're all wolves to each other.
00:44:52.600
Um, the thing about this ideology is, is just not, it's great.
00:45:10.320
And that is why to this day, there are people who say, well, I'm a communist.
00:45:13.960
They'll go on TV in this country and they'll say, I'm a communist.
00:45:17.840
And I mean, it's maybe not a fair question to ask you.
00:45:23.560
When she says that, Ash Tarker, I'm literally a communist.
00:45:29.120
I know what it would mean to me, but I don't think she has any idea really what she's talking
00:45:37.720
I can't, because I find it so hard, I actually can't see inside the minds of people who are,
00:45:44.940
you know, full luxury, automated communism, um, uh, and all the rest of this.
00:45:51.560
We've invited her on because I want to ask her this question and not in any hostile way.
00:45:58.400
It's fair to, you, you, you, you, you defend them.
00:46:00.480
If you're, if you're in a respectful environment, it's great.
00:46:04.720
And then, and then, but then you see, you do get the denial that comes in.
00:46:08.020
And this is, this is the other part of your question, which I, I haven't kind of yet answered.
00:46:12.540
You know, you get a Seamus Milne who, who worked very closely with Jeremy Corbyn, um, talking
00:46:17.680
about the great social advances for women that took place, um, in the Soviet Union.
00:46:26.640
I mean, you know, uh, as you say, a dog eat dog society, because for, uh, 70 years,
00:46:34.260
they have had the heart ripped out of property rights, of, of, of all moral rights.
00:46:43.140
I mean, you know, all, all moral standards, just, just taken away.
00:46:46.500
It's, it's the revolution, the revolutionary theory is that, that whatever suits the revolution
00:46:51.780
So then that becomes whatever suits me is okay.
00:46:55.760
I mean, after all, it all belongs to all of us.
00:47:01.320
And then I'm not going to work because I'm going to get paid anyway.
00:47:04.260
Um, and the incentive is gone because, uh, and, and, and, and on, but, but, but, you
00:47:09.900
know, there's a, there's, there's, they cover up, they call all these excesses, um, what
00:47:19.240
is it, the word, the communist party of Britain today.
00:47:23.520
You, you need to find their manifesto, the road to socialism.
00:47:27.020
Uh, I, I, I picked up a version, which was, um, you know, maybe 10 years ago or so, but
00:47:36.260
And, um, you know, they, they, they address Stalin's excesses and they say just, you know,
00:47:41.620
these were kind of accidental mistakes in the progress of communism and what Stalin did.
00:47:47.880
Well, they won't say, they won't say it's not real communism because actually they're
00:47:56.400
Not real communism, not real communism, not real communism.
00:47:59.080
So, so, so what was it that went on in Cambodia with Pol Pot?
00:48:07.120
Real communism is just nice and warm and fuzzy.
00:48:11.740
Because if you're going to control and take over every single part of the state, if you're
00:48:15.900
going to take over private property, if you're going to take over everything that any corporation
00:48:26.040
You have to be prepared to use force and you have to then keep force in there.
00:48:33.340
He said, when you got people who are resentful and hating something, don't stop it.
00:48:39.840
Actually use it, encourage it, because that's what we want to have weaponized.
00:48:48.420
And we see that in left-wing politics today, weaponized hate.
00:48:53.580
If you believe that class war is the only way through to the new utopia, you're not interested
00:49:02.480
You're not interested in coming together, in finding a middle ground.
00:49:11.640
You believe class war is going to be what is going to finally go into violence.
00:49:17.300
And then when we have the revolution, you will take power.
00:49:20.740
You will take the property of the elite, the privileged, the wealthy, whatever they are.
00:49:27.380
No, they'll run it with the same human frailty as anyone else will.
00:49:31.540
And actually, because then by then, they've actually got to run it for the whole country.
00:49:37.680
I mean, this was the thing in Russia, wasn't it?
00:49:40.380
You know, one factory somewhere in the middle of nowhere is told how many tins of baked beans
00:49:47.740
And if that's not enough, well, you don't get any more.
00:49:50.200
And someone else has to produce all the concrete.
00:49:52.760
And someone else has to produce all the tractor tires.
00:49:57.980
And then that's why you get conscripted labor, forced labor moved.
00:50:01.960
Because if you're putting a new factory somewhere and you don't have the labor for it,
00:50:21.180
We need 3,000 plumbers in the next three years.
00:50:23.620
You can be a plumber, but you can't be a doctor.
00:50:29.740
It's not a kind of privileged thing on the scale of professions.
00:50:36.100
Even if you're just going to have all this happening in a peaceful way without the violence,
00:50:41.560
you still have to have total control over your population.
00:50:46.380
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They go underground for a bit, and then they just flare up.
00:52:15.700
In the summer of 2020, with the BLM marches and, you know, abolish capitalism.
00:52:23.020
And I was there, and people who I thought were my friends, I mean, they're not really
00:52:27.000
friends with me anymore because they got upset because I criticised BLM, but they were
00:52:36.160
But we see it again and again and repackaged in a different way.
00:52:40.580
And the leaders of BLM, right, when actually talking about themselves, oh, you know, we're
00:52:50.080
And that's when I was like, look, I don't care.
00:52:52.260
I believe Black Lives Matter, blah, blah, blah.
00:52:58.000
But if you were talking to me about being a trained Marxist, then you want to abolish it.
00:53:06.300
You want to end up with the overthrow of society as it is now.
00:53:12.280
And, I mean, Trotsky was the one who said, you know, we'll deceive anyone we want to
00:53:20.760
You know, we're going to dupe all these people in the West.
00:53:24.340
We're going to dupe all our opponents because it's quite all right just to lie and deceive
00:53:30.900
So you don't believe these people when they say, oh, no, no, no, we only want to do this.
00:53:35.180
If they are doctrinaire Marxists, they'll, they'll not have any moral qualms about doing
00:53:41.380
anything in order to be able to get their aims.
00:53:43.720
And it's interesting you're adding somewhat to my historical understanding because I always
00:53:47.280
thought the main reason that, uh, that the West failed to recognize the evil of the Soviet
00:53:53.020
empire was that we needed, we, the West, I now consider myself part of the West, I suppose.
00:54:01.100
The West needed the Soviet Union to win the war.
00:54:04.460
We needed the Soviet Union and Stalin to win the war.
00:54:07.620
And if it wasn't for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't have happened.
00:54:10.520
So, but what you're telling me is even in the early thirties, when there was no need
00:54:17.880
for that whatsoever, there was no war, certain people in the West were ignoring it, covering
00:54:26.260
There's a guy, I don't remember his name now, who won a Pulitzer for covering up the, yeah,
00:54:31.740
the, the holodom or the starvation of the Ukrainian peasants.
00:54:38.340
I mean, the great Labour saint, I think he's got buildings named after him somewhere around
00:54:48.000
Uh, and, and he said, the story about slave camps in Russia is an absolute fabrication.
00:54:54.080
I, I, I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact quote, but you know, he said, it's
00:54:59.040
It's a free, it's a, it's a completely free state.
00:55:01.020
And then Clement Attlee, and, and he's really interesting because he totally turned around
00:55:05.720
But Clement Attlee in 1937, at the height of this 680,000 people being shot, okay, he
00:55:11.660
goes off to the, uh, Soviet embassy for the anniversary, uh, dinner of the 20th celebration
00:55:21.120
And he gives a speech, and I've seen the, the transcript of the speech, and he says, you
00:55:26.860
But they, they, they really hate the Soviet Union because they don't want to see a nation
00:55:36.240
And you think, whoa, 680,000 bodies is a lot of bodies.
00:55:45.640
Kiev is the most extraordinary city because you've got Babi Yar there where 30,000 Jews
00:55:50.140
But you go outside to Bokhivnia forest and, uh, the, the NKBD, the secret police planted
00:55:55.420
trees over maybe a hundred thousand dead, including some of the polls from Katyn.
00:55:59.940
After the war, Clement Attlee, absolutely brilliant.
00:56:03.980
What had happened, I think, is that he'd been in the wartime cabinet with Churchill and
00:56:10.100
He and Ernest Bevan, who became his foreign secretary in the first Labour government after
00:56:16.280
the war, um, what Churchill wrote about the, um, about Warsaw and how the Soviets backed
00:56:25.220
off at the last minute in order to make sure that all of the Polish resistance were wiped
00:56:30.900
out by the Germans and refused to allow Allied, uh, supply drops to go via Soviet aerodromes in
00:56:41.960
The Red, the Red Army called on the Poles to rise up and then they stopped outside the
00:56:49.860
Polish history is resonant with events like this.
00:56:52.680
But so Churchill said, I have, I have never spoken or seldom spoken to a cabinet that was
00:57:06.200
And then you get to the post-war period and Attlee is absolutely determined he is not going
00:57:14.240
He is meeting with the head of the security services to talk to him and find out where
00:57:22.460
And Ernest Bevan writes a report for the whole cabinet in 1947-48, a couple of them, where he's
00:57:28.500
talking about the threat to civilisation because of what's going on with the repression of the
00:57:33.120
Eastern European countries and saying this is a threat to world civilisation, what's happening
00:57:38.120
with all these poor people in country after country, you know, Poland and Hungary and
00:57:41.820
Romania, Bulgaria and all these states actually being taken over by communists and supposed
00:57:48.700
free elections being completely fixed and whatever else.
00:57:50.960
It's fascinating because that was the Labour Party at its best.
00:57:54.680
That was the Labour Party at its most admirable, really saw the world as it is.
00:57:59.980
It's interesting listening to you talk because it's difficult for me because it's my family
00:58:04.520
But also, I also notice as you talk that the exact same thing, maybe with not so much the
00:58:11.360
cover up, but apart from that, it's happening right now with Xinjiang in China.
00:58:15.140
And in Hong Kong and potentially in Taiwan eventually, hopefully not.
00:58:21.500
But do you think, like right now, we don't do anything about what China is doing because
00:58:29.620
Isn't that basically why we don't do anything, right?
00:58:31.980
But I don't think we are seeing, well, actually, now that I think about it, we are seeing people
00:58:40.700
We see American celebrities who are being paid by China to, but why was the cover up?
00:58:47.960
Why were they so keen in the 30s and others later?
00:58:51.340
I mean, if you read the preface to Animal Farm in which George Orwell talks about how difficult
00:58:57.560
it was to get it published because it was perceived that he was criticizing the Soviets,
00:59:06.700
Is it just because these people thought, well, we are, we're socialists, we believe in the
00:59:10.880
working class and we've got to, you know, this is the utopia they're creating?
00:59:19.420
Well, there's so many different ways I can answer that because, because a little rabbit
00:59:27.220
The British Trades Union movement was working hand in glove with Russians, officially Russian
00:59:34.320
trade delegates, but actually just Russian espionage, in order to be able to try and bring
00:59:40.820
We nearly had a revolution in 1920, in order to be able to stop British support for the
00:59:48.320
So there has been this, and I've just gone off on that rabbit trail too far.
00:59:54.280
My question was, why were they covering this up?
00:59:57.380
Why were they not challenging them more robustly?
01:00:01.360
You look through the 1930s and you get people like the guy who was the editor of Major Left
01:00:15.440
Anyway, very important man, well known in Labour intellectual circles, was basically saying,
01:00:21.300
you know, it's not really our part to criticise the people who are trying to build communism
01:00:29.600
Yeah, OK, things aren't going well, but we understand how in a revolutionary period, you
01:00:37.560
But the most important thing is, what's going to be the end result?
01:00:43.240
The same old thing, you know, if we're going to, you want to make an omelette, you've got
01:00:50.740
Um, there's no doubt that people were being totally duped, uh, by what was happening.
01:00:58.020
Uh, uh, Stafford Cripps, the, uh, shadow attorney general in the 90, early 1930s, 1933, 3036
01:01:11.060
He was actually saying in Parliament where, where they were talking about some British engineers
01:01:16.400
who'd been arrested and their Russian counterparts were very likely to be shot.
01:01:20.640
And there was even a possibility that these British engineers would be shot on spurious
01:01:25.720
This is the attorney, shadow attorney general, stood up in Parliament.
01:01:29.060
He said, but you know, if the Russian system is a system of justice, as I believe it is,
01:01:33.080
then if the death sentence is passed, it must be carried out.
01:01:39.380
People misunderstood, uh, what Soviet justice was.
01:01:44.000
They thought of law as being impartial, but they didn't even read the most obvious statements
01:01:52.360
made by Soviet leaders, which was that the courts were there entirely to be the servant
01:01:59.200
Law, according to Marx, bourgeois law is entirely fixed by the privileged class.
01:02:06.280
It's entirely created for the, for the protection of their property.
01:02:09.120
That's why you see today, um, very little respect amongst the left for the courts.
01:02:15.300
I mean, we could talk about Rittenhouse, but we won't talk about Rittenhouse.
01:02:21.720
No, the courts are the creation of the oppressor class for the fulfillment of their purposes.
01:02:27.760
So then you have the police, um, defund the police.
01:02:30.980
Uh, yeah, um, then you have abolish the army, get rid of the secret services.
01:02:36.600
All these are considered to be the organs of the state solely there to protect the privileged.
01:02:43.860
So, so were, were, were the Russians, to, to answer your question, involved in actually
01:02:50.980
Yes, but British communists saw them as colleagues.
01:02:54.160
You know, communism, communism has no national borders.
01:02:58.740
Another reason why you'll find on the left particularly, they don't care about immigration.
01:03:02.820
They don't care about national boundaries because in fact, there is only one nation.
01:03:05.940
That nation is the working class, the international working class.
01:03:09.120
Um, and they want to do anything they can to break down any sense of national identity as
01:03:16.500
It's, it's the nation that has to be broken down.
01:03:18.940
So, so yes, but, but I mean, these, these, these are our colleagues.
01:03:22.380
These are the people that we are working with to build, well, communism.
01:03:25.560
So, so on the one hand, there is, yes, there's the espionage side.
01:03:28.740
You know, there's the people they, they managed to get in the foreign office and elsewhere
01:03:32.100
and, and, and the Cambridge seven and all that.
01:03:36.520
Um, but, but for the most part, these people and British trades unionists in the period I
01:03:41.820
don't really cover, but through the seventies, you know, all that industrial unrest, um,
01:03:46.580
they'd be quite happy sitting and having a cup of coffee with, with somebody from the
01:03:51.360
Soviet embassy because they're our chums, they're our friends.
01:03:58.520
Well, I, I used to live in Wimbledon and there was a lovely coffee shop near to me run
01:04:05.460
And I used to go once or twice a week, we used to sit down and we used to talk, we used
01:04:12.780
We used to talk about his experiences growing up.
01:04:15.640
And I remember saying to him, Joel, why is it that communism is so appealing to people
01:04:20.500
And he said to me, the thing is, Francis, is talking to somebody about communism is
01:04:26.820
like saying to somebody who grew up talking to a Western about communism.
01:04:30.400
It's like saying to somebody who grew up in a very rich, privileged part of the city,
01:04:42.120
He said, it's only when they're in down the alley, it's only when they're turning around.
01:04:46.200
It's only when they see someone coming for them.
01:04:48.720
And it's only when they feel the blow to the back of the head, will they truly understand
01:04:55.180
And that's one of the reasons why actually it's so interesting to see people who have
01:05:00.080
come from Eastern European countries coming to this country and settling here because
01:05:09.560
You go to those nations now, they are under no doubt whatsoever that the regime that continues
01:05:16.740
basically on some of the same principles and is still run by a former secret policeman
01:05:24.780
You know, they have a whole history of suffering, your own family.
01:05:30.200
Someone walks down the street and they've got the Che Guevara t-shirt on them.
01:05:34.960
You just say you don't understand what lies behind this.
01:05:38.460
And I think that's what drives me with all of this is that for each of us, you know, there's
01:05:46.480
But I am just passionate that the real story is told, that people understand what lies behind
01:05:54.640
You know, I signed up to be a communist when I was at school.
01:06:08.220
I think I just like to be able to catch people before they really get swept up in it and say,
01:06:15.480
Do you really understand what it is you're buying into?
01:06:17.600
And I want the general public to know what they would know in Ukraine today, for instance.
01:06:25.220
They know today, four o'clock when I'm meant to be here.
01:06:28.220
Today's the annual celebration of the Holomodour.
01:06:33.900
I changed my Twitter picture to a candle today because these are the things we need to keep
01:06:46.040
Kids need to be educated about this stuff today.
01:06:55.880
Was asked to speak to a number of classes, all ages, right the way from 14, right the
01:07:00.700
way up to those who were leaving and going on to uni, and talked to them about this.
01:07:04.860
And I think for some of them, even though these subjects do come into their school curriculum,
01:07:09.620
it's the human experience of what people went through that really, really hits them.
01:07:22.620
Fyodor, someone, peasant, shot for counter-revolutionary activity.
01:07:30.940
She just looks like a good, ordinary farm laborer.
01:07:34.980
Laborer, and shot, and this state, and whatever else.
01:07:43.880
And they're still finding the bodies all over Eastern Europe.
01:07:47.060
And I suppose the question there, Giles, is why have we not got a Schindler's List for the Soviet Union?
01:07:56.220
Why have we not trained ourselves to recoil in disgust from all of these symbols and from this history, which we don't get taught?
01:08:03.700
Because the Soviets were on our side at the Nuremberg trials.
01:08:07.560
The Soviets were able to claim victor status against fascism.
01:08:17.800
Before we could be anti-racists, the buzzword was anti-fascism.
01:08:27.740
You know, I went to a meeting at the European Parliament some years back, which was held by Eastern European politicians.
01:08:37.660
And the title was, Why Was There No Nuremberg for the Crimes of Communism?
01:08:44.780
Well, I mean, to say those particular politicians, the Soviet Union took half of Poland before it was ever attacked by Germany.
01:08:55.200
It also annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, murdering tens of thousands of people in offices, as you say, and lots and lots and lots.
01:09:10.820
And, you know, as you know, I'm writing my first book about my experiences in Russia and the West and what I'm seeing happening here.
01:09:16.820
Which I'll be very interested to read because it's a fascinating idea.
01:09:19.920
But the thing that I'm trying to we've been trying to address on the show for the last three and a half years is, you know, two people who, broadly speaking, consider themselves sort of center left, maybe more center for me, center left for Francis.
01:09:35.380
We suddenly saw these very radical ideas about race, about sex and gender and sexuality, the just entering the public sphere, entering our world, comedy, the media, the political discourse suddenly turned in this way.
01:09:54.900
Which, to us, people who come from these countries, was really, really troubling.
01:10:00.880
Are you troubled by what is happening at the moment?
01:10:06.460
We're back to the same old oppressor, oppressed.
01:10:09.460
We're back to the fact that those who are the oppressed class are irredeemable.
01:10:15.160
People, they can never repent enough because they are, they are tainted by their very act of being.
01:10:23.740
That's, that, that, that, that's, that's way back there.
01:10:27.980
Working class criminals were irredeemable because they were just, they were just corrupted by capitalism.
01:10:34.060
We have, we have the, we have the dispute over truth.
01:10:36.960
You know, this idea, this idea that, that, that, that, that if you are a white male, you can have no idea about what real truth is.
01:10:45.720
Truth is whatever the oppressed feel is their truth.
01:10:49.680
Because you will always be tainted by your colonialist attitudes or by, by whatever it is that's driving you to keep your privilege.
01:10:58.340
Well, that's just, that's just a straight transfer from Marx.
01:11:01.640
And I'm not saying that what's going on with wokeism or whatever you want to call it is Marxism.
01:11:13.300
And I'm just trying to be, I'm just trying to be careful.
01:11:16.340
What I was about to say is I think probably they are, you know, third generation down, cousin, one off.
01:11:27.020
This is where I might disagree with you and correct me.
01:11:30.440
I'm quite prepared because I'm still thinking through these ideas myself.
01:11:34.500
To me, all I see is they've swapped capitalist bourgeois for white or male or straight or whatever you want.
01:11:44.960
And they've swapped working class, oppressed, subjugated for ethnic minority, sexual minority, female, etc.
01:11:57.940
To me, I don't see any difference in that sense.
01:12:02.260
I'm just conscious at the same time we've still got conventional old-fashioned Marxists alongside that.
01:12:10.560
So we've got the Marxists and the neo-Marxists.
01:12:13.980
I don't think there's anything I would disagree with on that.
01:12:25.320
I mean, like you guys, you know, you stood up, weren't really aware of what you were doing.
01:12:30.320
You just, no, come on, I'm not going to stand for this.
01:12:32.340
And then bang, boom, whatever happened to you and your various careers as they exploded or imploded, rather.
01:12:39.680
And I think it needs people everywhere who see what's going on.
01:12:44.080
It needs them to say, no, I'm going to stand against this.
01:12:48.240
Someone said the other day, you know, the frog in the hot water saucepan is just absolutely a fiction.
01:12:55.000
I don't care if it's a fiction because that's actually what is happening to a lot of people.
01:12:59.480
They are backed into a corner and they're just, oh, I can't be bothered to fight this.
01:13:08.580
And I think people need to, I tell you what I would like to see.
01:13:12.900
I would like to see a movement actually founded which could draw together all these different constituencies.
01:13:21.660
You know, we've got mostly gender critical feminists who are really able to stand up against the trans issue.
01:13:29.180
We've got other people from different areas of life.
01:13:32.960
I would like to see somehow if we could get some kind of coalition of people united.
01:13:39.660
I go to say, you know, we have dinner, 13 people around a table, some names and faces that are quite well known there.
01:13:50.120
He said, I'm meeting with a whole lot of people and we're all, everyone's just wringing their hands.
01:13:53.720
And they're just saying, what's going to happen?
01:13:58.280
So I don't know what a movement looks like, but you see what's happening in America among parents.
01:14:06.760
Now, you see, parents is ordinary people who say, no, you're not going to do this stuff to my kids.
01:14:16.920
We've got Christopher Ruffo doing all his incredible work.
01:14:20.080
And as a result, because of his prominence, he's getting all these secret documents leaked to him from one place after another.
01:14:27.520
And, you know, people may criticize Americans for their independence and their belligerence and whatever else.
01:14:34.000
But there's something in the American character which says, uh-uh, I'm going to stand up against this.
01:14:38.860
They didn't realize it's part of their culture.
01:14:44.740
I mustn't really complain about what teacher does or whatever.
01:14:47.120
I'd like to see not just the intellectuals alerted to this.
01:14:53.200
Because in a way, in some places, they have quite a limited, I mean, you have a big constituency.
01:15:01.660
But, you know, if you're a university professor, there's a limit to the influence you've got.
01:15:05.760
But if, you know, you're a whole movement of ordinary people out there, the general public, that's when this stuff starts to catch on.
01:15:15.640
But it's been something I've been mulling over now for two, three years.
01:15:21.760
We need a peaceful, respectful revolution, but one that's got courage.
01:15:26.700
And on that note, Giles, thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:15:30.100
If people want to find you online, where would be the best place to do that?
01:15:35.200
And, of course, people should buy the book, Labour and the Good Lakes.
01:15:37.620
Yeah, well, it's just being reprinted in a couple of weeks' time.
01:15:41.440
My publishers took one look at the thick brick and said, we just can't afford to do that again.
01:15:48.040
Well, our final question, as you know, as always, is what's the one thing no one is talking about that we really should be?
01:15:56.260
So we have been talking about it, which is good.
01:16:00.540
Well, we're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals.
01:16:02.960
But in the meantime, Giles Udy, thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:16:08.980
And, of course, thank you so much for watching and listening.
01:16:18.160
We'll see you with another brilliant episode or Raw show.
01:16:22.500
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01:16:29.660
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01:16:32.620
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