Life of the Week: Stalin | HistoryExtra - "‘The Holodomor is the period of starvation that afflicted Ukraine in the early 1930s as a result of agricultural collectivization. Uh the forcing of peasants into collective farms and the removal of the better off peasants entirely from the land that they had cultivated. The result of that was the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants. Collectivization affected Kazakhstan and all of Russia, so that similar incidents of starvation is found in uh those areas too, but the Ukrainians felt with some reason that they were being punished for being Ukrainians as well as for being peasants and uh it was particularly sharp, the aggressiveness of the Bolsheviks towards the Ukrainian nation... He was a fragile dictator in as much as he knew that many of the party comrades… disliked or were appalled by the violent methods that he had imposed on the country in the first and then the second five-year plans uh and this disqui-, this unease this dislike about Stalin made Stalin decide that the very people who had carried out his policies loyally: sometimes with reservations but nevertheless loyally, were an obstruction to the cons-, consolidation of his personal dictatorship and being a a brutal man as well as a fearful man, a suspicious man, uh he turned on the very people who had helped him into a position of personal despotism. And he did this because he thought that he could replace the old Bolshevik Elite with a new Young Elite that he would train or get trained to fulfill the industrial and Agricultural and Commercial and political tasks which the new Soviet state required. So in a way it was a strategy of the most terrible human pessimism by Stalin, combined with an extreme optimism that you could do this to a country, a society, a state and come out at the other end of the tunnel with a new state that would be more pliable, more obedient and would be able to present itself to the rest of the world, as offering a vision of the Communist future that would eventually spread all over the earth’...
‘If you were anywhere near Stalin you had to tread very very carefully, cautiously and he in 1952, 1953 had indicated by some of his measures that he was going to get rid of half of the very leading core of the Communist party, so it was a very edgy time for them. And when he had one of his relapses and the servants reported… that he, he'd been found on the floor in one of his dachas they took the decision to go out there and see what was really happening outside Moscow. And they decided that the best thing to do was not to touch him because that way this highly suspicious, uh highly vengeful, constantly murderous dictator would die a lingering death that would free them from the weight of ever having to hold him in dread ever again. So he died not in a humorous way but in a really sad way for any human uh being. But you can see why they let it happen. That way if by a miracle he recovered ,none of them could be accused of having plunged a dagger in his back or pointed a a gun at his head, his death would be through natural causes. And so they withheld the medical support, that might have alleviated his suffering and might even have saved his life, and without doctors he was a goner’...
'He murdered culture, he murdered hope. He murdered the willingness of Soviet citizens to take a risk in saying no to official policy and that that tendency in Soviet culture has persisted through into the present day and it is has enabled subsequent leaders following the end of Communism particularly Vladimir Putin to impose his will because there's a memory of families inside families of what the cost of open political opposition might be'"
Life of the week: Spartacus | HistoryExtra - "‘It's difficult and strenuous and is also perceived by many people as deeply shameful. These are people who are putting their mostly naked bodies out there to be seen by the public and to bring the public pleasure. Uh for a number of elite Romans this is akin to prostitution, and it's something that degrades those who participate in it’"
How Real Is Masters Of The Air? The True Story Of The Bloody Hundredth | HistoryExtra - "'You went to an interrogation center where they seemed to know everything about you and uh so much so that guys kind of broke down a little bit and divulged information… because the Germans seemed to know everything and what they've been doing is um they had a communication lines with German-Americans in places like Yorktown in New York, very German section, Detroit and whatnot and they would send them German-American publications, high school yearbooks, issues with stars and stripes, Yankee paper and stars and stripes when it covered guys in the war... We know know what you know. We're just trying to verify it. We know about your parents etc etc’"
Conspiracy: who killed JFK? | HistoryExtra - "'He's looking to make his mark, he's ready to commit himself to killing this general to change the course of history. He now has the possibility of throwing a much bigger cog into the machinery of government. The Oswald that I know, I say, could've been in the sixth floor of a building in downtown Moscow shooting Nikita Khruschev. Now that surprises some people. His disdain for the USSR at this point was only slightly less than his disdain for the United States'...
‘Ruby… is worked up over the course of the weekend, not by mobsters or by agents who are hiring him to coloso [s]?] but by his own family, his own sister, were sort of saying what a terrible thing happened to the president, how disgraceful it is. Jack Ruby, on Friday night, the night that Oswald's arrested is at Dealey Plaza, at the police station. Now you think to yourself how the hell is that possible. The police security is disgraceful that evening. Ruby wasn't the only one who was there. You would think they would have it on total lockdown. Ruby comes in, all the cops know him because they hang out as his strip club, he is passing out his business card… come down to my club before you leave Dallas. Jack Ruby's the type of guy who likes to be where the action is and where the action was that night in Dallas, was at the police headquarters where all the world's press was coming in and gathering for this. Now let's assume for a second that the conspiracy, there's a conspiracy to kill the president and it's no matter who's involved. Forget for a second who the, this conspiracy is really good because to this day the conspirators haven't been unmasked and people like me as independent journalists who get into it believe the fake story. Oswald alone. So the conspiracy is good. No evidence left at the scene to unmask it. But somehow the conspirators have done everything right but they forgot to take care of Oswald. You only have to kill Oswald if he knows something if he's a real patsy you don't have to kill him. So if you have to kill him because he knows something you're prepared to kill him at Dealey Plaza but Oswald gives you the slip. How does he give you the slip? He goes out the front door. That's what. He left through the front door. Doesn't seem very much like the slip, it's not through a back door or something else with a side entrance, goes out the front door. You miss him, he gets arrested, he's in custody. You now call up Jack Ruby and you say Jack, we have the most important assignment of your career, you got to kill this guy who's in police custody because otherwise all the secrets of the assassination are going to unravel. And Ruby goes down on Friday night, is there a few hours after the rest, one point Oswald passes not far away from him in the hallway. And Ruby makes no effort to go to him, shoot him. No, nothing to silence him. It's like Jack Ruby got an assignment to kill him and was like Jack do this most important assignment but at your convenience. Then on Saturday the next day Jack Ruby goes back to Police Headquarters, he's there again he's handing out his business card, he brings in pizzas. Oswald comes out again, he's walked down the hallway. Ruby makes no effort to. And on Sunday when Ruby does does kill Oswald, he wakes up late, he's got a roommate, George Senator, who just says, and he gets a call from one of his strippers who says: I need a money gram for $25, can you send it to me and Ruby says I will. The only way he can do that is through a Western Union telegram office that's downtown, it's the only one open that day in Dallas, so he gets up, takes his time. By the time he drives downtown to send the money gram to his employee, Oswald was supposed to have been transferred from police custody to the feds, he was being moved out an hour earlier. But it got delayed because he asked for a change of clothes and a postal inspector turned up. When Ruby gets to send the money gram he's a block and a half away from where the jail is, he sees the crowd down there, he goes in, he stands in line at the Western Union office, he's in no rush according to the person, he sends the money gram at 1125, it's stamped by the machine, walks back out, has his dogs, these two little dog. Sends in the car, locks it, walks down the street and just as he does the police are moving a car up to sort of block the street they're about to move Oswald out of the downstairs area and get ready to transfer, Ruby walks down the ramp and as Oswald comes out he walks up to the crowd, pulls out the gun and shoots him like out of a movie. One shot, fatal shot, says you shot my president you rat. And it sounds like a James Cagney line or something and they tackle Ruby. It is this as opposed to being what I call a careful plot to silence the assassin, it's an opportunity that presents itself to a guy who thinks people are going to clap him on the back and say you know what thank you Jack for erasing the stain from Dallas of what this guy did to the president of the United States. There's a crime in Dallas at that time crime in Texas called murder without malice. You kill somebody without malice you get 5 years maximum. That's what Ruby thought he would get at the most. He was shocked when he got convicted for murder… all these years later there's all this debate about okay who killed Kennedy… people forget that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination that doubt wasn't there... when the word spread out onto the street that Oswald had been shot, they didn't know he was dead, but just said he'd been shot, inside the the basement the crowd breaks into, spontaneously into applause and cheers. It's really chilling because we don't like the idea of applause or cheers for any violence or murder, I get that. But it shows you the mindset of a Ruby that thinks you could do that and people would say that was the right thing to do because we think now everybody must be horrified. I'm horrified and I'm furious because Ruby's murder of Oswald is why the case will never be closed notwithstanding my optimistic title of Case Closed. People always have doubts about it. Because of that Oswald never got to the stand, the government never presented its evidence, he never, Oswald had the chance to contest it and even if he had been convicted and gone to jail and said I still it was a massive plot some people would have thought it was a conspiracy but not nearly as many. Ruby's murder of Oswald is what really robs us of history, of knowing what happened in detail'...
‘There was a national opinion poll done about 6 months ago that showed I think 33 or 35% of the public thought it was a lone assassin, and people said to me at the time, God that must be so disappointing to you, only a third of the public. I said I was sort of exhilarated by that because it had been down to 5% after Oliver Stone's film’"
Alexandria: the first modern city | HistoryExtra - "'People do venture to Egypt and they do venture to the Mediterranean and they do go to ancient capitals like Athens and Rome and Istanbul. But not many people go to Alexandria… part of it is the fact that the past isn't as clearly visible there. If you want to see the Ptolemaic artifacts from the first few centuries, most of those are under the city, it's hard to excavate them because there's a metropolis above them. And many of the artifacts are under the water in the depths of the sea. It's estimated that around 1% of the artifacts have been discovered under the water. So lot of the ancient city’s missing. There's also the fact the city kind of erases itself as one generation moves to another, because Alexandria was so sought after, it's part of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, then the Ptolemaic Empire, then the Roman Empire. For periods it's Persian and then it's Ottoman Muslim, Ottoman, French, British. With each of those there are subcategories. So when it becomes Muslim there are the Mamluks and the Abbasid and the Fatamids, each of those has their own architecture, their own economic strategy and they kind of erase some of what came before it. So rather than having a melting pot of different architecture it's kind of just erased and something new is built in its place'...
‘What started as as something of a noble task, became something of an obsession. So at first they used their contacts. Demetrius was the governor of Athens and and he sought asylum, the chief of the library then. So they use their contacts. They try to write to other libraries to take books that aren't needed that they could, that they could borrow and so on. The Ptolemies, for Ptolemy II to III, they write to other heads of state asking for their books. Often they ask to borrow them and they pay huge deposits. There's there's an example where they take the work of the Greek tragedians from Athens uh for the equivalent deposit of about £300,000 today, and they simply don't return it, they keep it. So it became a kind of process where they had to think whether the, that foreign relation was more important or the books... ships that docked into Alexandria's Harbor for example would be searched. Not for contraband but for books. If a book was found it was immediately confiscated. When it's confiscated it's then copied in the library and in all likelihood it was the copy that was going back to the owner. You weren't allowed to take an original book out of Alexandria, you'd be searched on your way out. Then when other libraries began to develop like in Pergamon, there was a ban on exporting papyrus. So that embargo was to stop other libraries from rivaling Alexandria. That's where we get the the start of parchment instead of papyrus’"
From the Mongols to the Huns: the nomads who dominated Eurasia | HistoryExtra - "'The Khazars and to the Bulgars settled on the Bulgar River… he's very offended of the fact that all sorts of private activities are done in front of the group and he complains about it. And his hosts point out, well, maybe our women, you see more than you would in, say, Baghdad, but our women are modest and true to their husbands whereas your women wear veils and we know they're all seducing each other in Baghdad, we have these wild stories about this, so aren't you being a little disingenuous in your moral outrage?'...
‘Some areas are better suited for raising their own horses uh than others. Western Europe can breed very successful workhorses and, uh and heavy chargers. China on the other hand does not produce the fodder that will allow their horses to develop strong bones, that's selenium. And they were always dependent on imported beasts from the steppes. And that was an advantage of the Eastern Nomads. They could hold the Chinese emperor up for many bolts of silk in return for horses’"
Conspiracy: was Elizabeth I a man? | HistoryExtra - "‘Obviously he was a vicar with a lively imagination. It was just really then uh seized upon, because it seemed to, at the time, in the 1800s, explain an awful lot that was still very very confusing to the Victorian people. They could not believe that Elizabeth had ruled so effectively as a woman in a man's world and so this really helped to explain it. If she'd been a man all along, that's why she was so good at everything. She was described by her tutors at the time so her actual tutors writing at the time said that Elizabeth had more the understanding of a man than a woman and I guess, there were other things as well. Robert Cecil her secretary said that she is more than a man and sometimes less than a woman. So even in Elizabeth's lifetime or perhaps especially there were these kind of rumors about her sexuality, her gender. She was seen as somehow an oddity. You simply couldn't have a woman this brilliant, this gifted. She had to have something physically that made her like this... Victoria, yes, she was another powerful female figurehead. She was sovereign of course but she was conventional. She'd married early in her reign, she had nine children. she herself said that she was a wife first and a queen second. So that really conformed to the Victorian ideal. Elizabeth as an unmarried sovereign absolutely didn't and I think the Victorians were quite deeply uncomfortable with this... Bram Stoker really got his teeth into this… he claimed that there was a change in Elizabeth's handwriting from 1542 when he said that she died to 1543 and he's comparing a couple of letters she wrote to Catherine Parr her last stepmother and for a start they, Catherine Parr didn't even become her stepmother until 1543 but anyway let's put that to one side. He claims there's a real difference in the style of Elizabeth's handwriting and also in her comprehension and he points to the fact there's a letter apparently from one of Elizabeth's attendants to one of her tutors saying you know you're going to have to go a bit more slowly in your lessons, she she kind of has to catch up. I'm not even aware that's a that's a valid letter but but Stoker talks about it quite vaguely...
Surely Henry [VIII] would have recognized that suddenly there's somebody completely different in the place of his daughter… as Queen I mean she was never alone. She was always attended, she would have been dressed by her ladies and a whole army of ladies. You couldn't keep a secret like this… we have actually, are quite detailed records of for example Elizabeth's menstrual cycle because ambassadors were inquiring into this. So we know that she was functioning as a woman because that was valid information to inquire about for ambassadors who were treating for her hand in marriage. They had to know that she was fertile and she was examined by doctors’...
‘Is this a theory that you still encounter today?’...
‘Regularly. There are a couple of questions that I get asked more than any other when I'm giving talks. For example top of the list is, was Elizabeth really a Virgin Queen? That's top. Bizly boy I think probably comes second. People love it because they they think this this explains it. And what a neat explanation it would be. So people absolutely are still invested in this but. But I would say almost equal second or perhaps third on the list of most asked questions is is it true that Elizabeth had Thomas Seymour's child. So, for every rumor that there was some physical impediment for Elizabeth to to marry and have sex, such as that she's a man, there's one that says she had a lover and that she had an illegitimate child, several illegitimate children according to some rumors. So where does the truth between these two extremes, I think they all boil down to the same point, you know that she had to be more than just a woman alone ruling a country. She had to have either a string of male lovers helping and guiding her, or she had to be a man. But it's fascinating isn't it that all of the questions I'm asked more than any other revolve around Elizabeth's gender and sexuality and and that really is the genesis of this conspiracy theory’
‘So this must point to much more recent misogyny than just the Tudor age because this conspiracy theory was born in the Victorian era, it's still believed today. So we're talking about modern day misogyny as well here aren't we?’"
Clearly the speculation has nothing to do with her never taking a spouse or having children, and her being known in her day for being a Virgin (which she herself encouraged). The only explanation is misogyny
The Renaissance: an explosion of creativity | HistoryExtra - "'Medieval Europe has such a limited conception of geography. One thing I actually claim in the book is that they had a clearer idea of the geography of Hell and of Purgatory and of Heaven than they did of the physical Earth and you know I think that's true because you read Dante's Divine Comedy, has unbelievably precise topography of the other world and the next life'...
‘Leonardo da Vinci boasts in his notebooks, he says that he painted a Madonna for a private religious use. But the man who commissioned it brought it back to him and said can you change it because I'm finding it too attractive basically. And it's confusing me at prayer’"
Life of the week: Queen Victoria | HistoryExtra - "‘Her first decision as Queen was to spend an hour on her own, because that's something she hadn't been allowed to do during this increasingly restrictive childhood, she wanted to be completely alone’...
‘Lots of people quote um something that really Victoria never said about, you know, I am not amused. And when you see photographs of Victoria she looks like a sort of very sour-faced old woman. Very miserable, distraught of course after the the death of her husband Albert and really a mourner for the rest of her life. That was not the real Victoria. So the young Victoria was completely different to that. She came to the throne something of a party girl. She was like a breath of fresh air now that she was at last free from that Kensington system she was always going out and partying all night, she was at balls and assemblies, she was very sociable, she loved to laugh. And she was naturally very gregarious, very outgoing. She loved company, much more so actually than her future husband Albert who, uh at one of their early meetings he attended one of her birthday parties and was absolutely wiped out by it and had to go to bed early and Victoria was still up partying till the early hours... they were born very close together you know, they, just a few weeks apart. In fact the same midwife delivered both Victoria and Albert’...
'We would probably consider it a more sinister side today in that it was quite a coercive relationship, I I don't think that's overstating it in that Albert did dominate Victoria and he did bend her to his will if she was as he saw it wayward or disobedient. You, he would, he would discipline her almost like a child and then, and then when she did something that he approved of he would call her dear good child. So she was actually quite submissive to Albert and and his word was law. And yet this was the woman who began her reign saying I dreaded the thought of marrying, I was so accustomed to having my own way that I thought it 10 to one I shouldn't agree with anybody and Albert changed all of that…
This was a woman who hated being pregnant, didn't really like children very much, but she had nine of them. She was, you know pregnant almost straight away, straight after they got married and she was almost continually pregnant you know for the first well certainly more than a decade of her marriage. She was either recovering from her birth or she was pregnant which had a very profound impact on her queenship... when they married she chose to obbey Albert and she said that she wanted to be married as a woman, not as a queen… there was a wonderful census return for Buckingham Palace for the year 1851 where Albert is listed as head of the household at Buckingham Palace and uh Victoria, her profession is just listed as Queen. But she's not the head of the household. And I think that really spoke volumes, so she was really playing the part of a, of a good Victorian housewife'...
‘She put the morality back in the monarchy and let's just say it had been at a bit of a low uh by the end of uh this endless succession of Georges that we had. And her Wicked uncles as they became known, George IV and William IV his brother who who succeeded him for a brief time as. I mentioned they weren't all that keen on marriage, they much preferred their Mistresses and that was fairly typical of George III's children who one sources claimed had 52 illegitimate children between them. Quite an impressive feat. So there was a sense that you know that the monarchy's public standing was at an all-time low by the time Victoria came to the throne. She put the moral heart back into the monarchy. But the other thing that she did was this was a a time now when the Monarch no longer ruled, they reigned. It was a constitutional position so it was I guess the the semblance of power without any of the reality of it. Um and Victoria didn't try to change that but what she did was increasingly align the nation with the crown, so the crown came to represent Ordinary People, and people's views. And this was an important check and balance on government um and it really made government aware of of what people on the streets were actually thinking and and one prime minister, I think it was Disraeli, said of Victoria: if I knew what the queen was thinking then nine times out of 10 I knew what her people were thinking too. And and that was a real change, this aligning of the crown and the people. But I think the other thing that Victoria really gave the nation and gave the monarchy was the Bling. The pomp, the pageantry, the ceremony. That had believe it or not been pretty shambolic by the time she came to the throne, the Georges hadn't been very good at all of that, there were lots of farcical catastrophes in big Royal events, you know tantrums thrown by monarchs in public and it was all just a bit of a farce and very embarrassing… she introduced so many of the ceremonies and traditions that as I said we tend to assume date back hundreds of years. They're only really a couple of hundred years old and uh uh even if that actually and many of them can be laid at Victoria's door. And so really I think it's with Victoria that we get a sense of not just the pomp and pageantry but the history of the British crown and I think that's what's still very much at the forefront today and and it's what's celebrated, it's what's emphasized by any canny monarch...
Victoria's biggest achievement was to make the monarchy popular again'"
History Behind the Headlines: Elections, ‘panda diplomacy’ and the word of the year | HistoryExtra - "‘Voting, democracy and popular participation are not all the same thing and that being able to separate them out and understanding they have their own historical trajectories is really important. I have to say another example actually of a European vote which caused problems from uh the period before the uh the current era came to mind which was the Polish Parliament the Sejm of the 18th century, because if I understood it correctly that particular Parliament was noted for having something called a unique veto which meant that any member of the parliament if they didn't like the policies that were being put forward, could vote no and everything would fall, and I'm just pointing out that Poland itself as a nation state or as a as a state in in Europe disappeared from the map really between the late 18th century and the early 20th and at least some people would argue that its sort of ultra participatory nature at least for those who are entitled to be in the Polish Parliament and who could just cast a veto on all sorts of policies through one vote, may have been relevant to that particular downfall. Again it's a sign that democracy demands consensus but it also demands that those who are on the losing side do acknowledge that sometimes they can't get everything that they want'...
‘You mentioned giraffes, the camel leopard and actually it ain't just in the the classical world where that happened because um one of the most notable, perhaps the most notable Chinese sailor of the premodern era the Admiral Zheng He… he visited… even the coast of Africa. And that was where he got one of his major menagerie gains if you might put it it that way because it's said that he actually managed to capture amongst other things a strange creature with a long neck and spots which he brought back to Nanjing the the capital in in China. Now we would think of this of course of as the giraffe but in Chinese mythology this was recognized as being the Qilin. And if you're seeing a Qilin you're in a very good place as the emperor. It's the equivalent to something like a unicorn I would say in uh the European tradition, because what it suggests, this very very rare and unusual beast is a sign of a blessed reign that's going to go extraordinarily well. And the good luck that they managed to to achieve of getting this giraffe and letting it survive and getting all the way back to China to appear at court... presumably if it turned up and conked out it would have been an extremely dire sign for the future of that particular Emperor. As it happened he lived a pretty long period on the throne. He was a usurper himself which is one of the things that meant that going back to our earlier theme, legitimacy was very important to him’...
[On Rizz] 'I asked a 15-year-old with whom I'm closely acquainted uh about the use of this word to which she explained um, that yes this word was actually quite widely used, but people stopped using it just about the same time that the OED discovered it. So I think it may have come onto the books just at the point where when actual 15 year olds are no longer saying it'"
Aztec warfare | HistoryExtra - "‘The ideal death for an Aztec warrior was to die either in battle or as a sacrifice. So you wouldn't die in your own city and be buried in your city, it happens somewhere else. So the rituals tend to be rituals of mourning that don't actually involve your body or your bones at all. The Aztecs believe that how you die determines the afterlife that you go to. So it's not about what you do in your life, it's about how you die. So people who die a watery death go to the water afterlife for example. Most people go to a place called Mictlan, The Land of the Dead which is a kind of dark place. It's not hell exactly. It's a damp, dark, not very pleasant place under the Earth and their spirits will remain there until the world is devoured at the end of time. Now there are few ways you can escape that fate. The two most obvious ones being either to die as a warrior in battle or in sacrifice or to die in childbirth, and those two deaths are paralleled in the Aztec belief system... women who die in childbirth who are seen as warriors’...
‘There is one example that we know of where women actually fight, and that is in the 1473 Civil War where the Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital fight with the Tlatelolco who, it's the other city that's on the island there on basically. And there's a really desperate Civil War and we know that the Tlatelolca women come out and that not only with traditional weapons but they squirt breast milk onto their opponents and show them their buttocks and they throw weaving implements at them, and so they're fighting both in the traditional way but also with like weapons of femininity. And that shows that desperation but it also is something that's paralleled in our sources, we often see goddesses holding weaving batons, their, the kind of wooden stick bit that you use to push down the threads...
One of the amazing things about Aztec culture is it's the only premodern culture I know of that has Universal education for boys and girls’"