A Conversation with historian Jackson van Uden

My friend historian, political scientist, and author Jackson van Uden and I had a conversation about totalitarian regimes and the movie ‘The Death of Stalin’. The movie is a satire, so we were able to talk about this dark subject from a different lens than usual.

Jackson’s info: 

• website: https://historywithjackson.co.uk/
• podcast ‘History with Jackson’: https://historywithjackson.co.uk/podcast
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HistorywithJackson/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/historywithjackson/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/history-with-jackson
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@historywithjackson?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxXh8pNeS7gdE377kgrNOIw
• books ‘The Crystallisation of Totalitarianism’ and ‘Dictators’: https://historywithjackson.co.uk/books

☕️ Production & marketing assistance: Coffeelike Media,
https://www.coffeelikemedia.com/

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Transcript

Interview with Jackson: The Death of Stalin

Hello everyone! I talked about the Romanovs and Anastasia last episode. And this episode, I’m going to be following up on that, and discuss what happened after the Russian Monarchy ended and the new government took over to sort of close out this bit of Russian history.

However, I’m not a political or military historian, so I admit that I find it difficult to talk about. Not just because I have a huge knowledge gap in this part of history, but because I want to try to be positive and uplifting here on Door Key, and … well, there’s not a lot of positive or uplifting things I can say about Stalin.

So I asked my friend, Jackson van Uden to come on the pod to discuss it with me. He’s a historian and political scientist who specializes in totalitarian regimes, and would be able to fill in the gaps of knowledge I have.

As far as tone goes, we decided to frame our discussion around the movie The Death of Stalin. It’s a satire that brilliantly depicts what things were like during and after Stalin died.

I think satire is a great lens to view a dark subject like this through, and I’m so grateful that Jackson agreed to this. I really enjoyed my conversation with him, and I hope you do as well!

April: Hello everyone! I’ve talked about Rasputin, I’ve also talked about The Romanovs and Anastasia. I wanted to close the door on this chapter of history by discussing what happened after that and discuss Stalin.

This is where my friend historian and political scientist Jackson van Uden comes in! Jackson specializes in Totalitarian regimes. He’s the author of two books ‘The Crystallisation of Totalitarianism’ and ‘Dictators’, and is currently writing ‘Hitler vs Stalin’ with Pen and Sword Military. He also has a podcast ‘History with Jackson’, and I’m so lucky to have him here to discuss this with me! Jackson, welcome, and thank you so much for being here!

Jackson: No. thank you, thank you so much for having me on April. I’m really, really looking forward to discussing my favorite movie, and then my favorite areas of history. And I do apologize for how wordy my titles are. I write it, and I think ‘that looks awesome’, but then even I trip over my words when I’m reading my titles. I feel so sorry for you, I’m sorry about that!

April: Oh my gosh, no, it’s a great title! It’s me that has the problem pronouncing things sometimes!

Jackson: No, I have it as well, don’t worry!

April: So would you tell me about the books you’ve written, and talk a little bit about the book you’re writing right now?

Jackson: Yeah of course, thank you! My first book was based on my undergraduate dissertation, and it’s the Crystallization of Total … see now there I’ve done it! The Crystallization of Totalitarianism, how the 1953 conference on totalitarianism codified the term. It’s looking at this one conference in 1953, incredibly niche, that looks at what totalitarianism was at that moment in time, and I explore some of the key speakers at that conference, what their contribution to the field of totalitarianism was, and what the main findings that came out of that conference were, and how that influenced the field since then. So one of the main speakers who I felt came out of that was Carl J Friedrich. Now Carl J Friedrich was probably one of the most influential thinkers in totalitarian studies, and he came up with at the conference with a five-point framework that told us what totalitarianism was at that point. Now he didn’t mean for it to define the term, but it very much has come to influence our thinking on what totalitarianism is or was perhaps more so than Hannah Arendt, who we all know is, or some people know is the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Now that was my first book, I really, really enjoyed writing that one. And then the second one was a book called Dictators as you pointed out. Which came off the back of a six part series that I did when I used to do video essays on YouTube. I took the transcripts, I edited them and turned them into a book because I love writing about dictators, I love writing about tyranny, and I love totalitarian leaders and that’s largely where that one came from. So off the top of my head I spoke about Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, the Kim Dynasty, and what is a totalitarian dictator. So that’s what that book was about. It was very much a book that I wanted to put out, but it was a platform to build the rest of my work from. So the book that I’m currently writing is Hitler vs. Stalin I’m writing that with Pen and Sword Military and in that book I’m looking at and comparing their political terror. Very, very morbid topic. But, you know, looking at how … firstly, what is totalitarianism in that book, what is political terror, because we all have this idea of what it is, but we have a popular idea of the sensationalist idea … you know, killing people in the street and that style of idea, but what is it, how is it enacted but then how does these two regimes do it. And then how have these two regimes set a blueprint for how political terrorism is enacted by the regime, so … I promise you I’m good conversation at pub, but my bookshelf is quite red, as I was telling you beforehand, it’s quite red, and very morbid to be honest.

April: It’s fascinating though! It really is! And I think it’s important that we pay attention to things like this and learn about it. We can’t just ignore it, even if it’s unpleasant.

Jackson: No I totally agree on that, and I think that’s part of the reason why I work on the topic – it’s because I don’t believe … there’s a small number of us that work in totalitarianism … and I don’t believe that the regimes that are totalitarian just disappeared after the 1960s, so within the field you kind of see the … you see the dropping of popularity of totalitarianism about the 1960s, and the rising of what people characterizing as authoritarian from the 1960s onwards, because you do have the dearth of totalitarian regimes at that point. But I thoroughly believe that totalitarianism is still relevant, so I want to talk about it to educate people on what is a totalitarian regime, how is it different from an authoritarian regime, because I feel that we should know that, and we should be able to highlight it, we should be able to point it out, we should be able to talk about it. But also so that they can recognize the signs themselves. We’re at a point now where our media is increasingly polarized, and we’re having to read information ourselves and dissect what’s going on ourselves and form our own political opinion. And if people have the tools in front of them to say ‘well this is what political terror is’ ‘this is what totalitarianism is’ then I believe I’m giving people the knowledge so that they can form their own opinions. Now obviously if people are wrong about it, I’ll tell them they’re wrong, but I want to at least give them the tools so they can form their own opinion.

April: Yeah, there’s that saying ‘those that don’t study history are doomed to repeat it’, so it’s good that you study this. So please tell me about your podcast History with Jackson.

Jackson: Yeah, so History with Jackson is a platform where I like to give historians the space to talk about their specialism, to talk about their research. We’re bringing up-to-date historical research to people in an accessible and digestible way. So what I found when I was coming up as a historian, hard to believe that I am a historian now, that there was not a lot of people there, the people were supportive, but there wasn’t a place there for people to go to go and either put their work out in a quick and easier way so that people have that guidance so with the blog I love to help young historians and people, early career researchers really get their work out there and help them on that journey to becoming what they would consider historian, because often in the beginning of our journeys as early career researchers is that we don’t think of ourselves as historians or political scientists or thinkers, really. And then on the podcast I bring historians from across the world to talk about their research. It’s absolutely awesome, I get sent books virtually every week and I get to talk to some fantastic historians about the work that they’ve done in their books. And a lot of the time the research in that book is brand new or recently rediscovered in archives and they’ve brought it to the public for the first time. And it’s absolutely fantastic to be able to talk to these historians about the work that they’ve done just about what they’ve put in their book. Often, I find a lot of the places that talk about their books, they’re either coming from an agenda, they want to cover a certain topic, or they want to look at something in a certain way. Meanwhile, I like to hand the agenda to the historian, this is your book, we’re talking about the book, we’re trying to promote you and your work in the best way, do you like these questions, is there anything you specifically want to talk about? And I feel that it makes a better conversation, a better discussion with historians because they’re finally able to talk about what they want to talk about. When I talk about my research, my work, there’s often a plethora of anecdotes that I want to talk about and I bring to people, but it just doesn’t fit the tone of what the host of that podcast where they want to go. Sometimes they might have a social slant, sometimes they might have a particular topic they want to look at within that, and being able to be a podcaster and author and look at what I would like as an author or a podcaster it’s been a pretty awesome journey to be honest. Now I’m rambling, I’m so sorry April, but yeah, it’s a pretty awesome job.

April: Well I think everyone should check out your podcast, it’s fantastic. I listen to it, I enjoy it. Where is it available?

Jackson: I’m going to do the age-old thing that all podcasters shouldn’t do but it’s on all podcast platforms so you can listen to it on Apple podcasts, search history with Jackson, spotify, history with Jackson – I think people are getting the drill now. But also, we have a website, which is www.historywithjackson.co.uk. So on there you can listen to the podcast, you can look at articles from fantastic historians from across the world on the blog. I also, when I have the time, I write on there as well. And then, across social media @historyjackson on Instagram there’s loads of little clips of the podcast if you can’t be bothered to sit down for an hour, because I know some people can’t, and you can look at me present history in short form reels and tictocs as well on those social media sites. So there’s a plethora of things that we offer, but if you go to historywithjackson.co.uk, there’s little social media icons in the top corner so you can jump across the world, across the web on there.

April: Ok, and like I said, I highly recommend people find the website, go find the podcast, check it out! Jackson, this is a dense, heavy topic we’re going to be talking about today, so I wanted to jump right in. Just so that we’re all on the same page, would you please explain what exactly is meant by Totalitarianism and Totalitarian regimes?

Jackson: This is my favorite question I get asked because I finally get to talk about what I bore my family to death with on a daily basis. I’m going to take the definition that I prefer and the 20th century definition that I prefer when I do my work on 20th century totalitarianism, which is the definition by Carl J Friedrich that he wrote with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor for the US government under I think it was Jimmy Carter. There are six points that expands upon Friedrich’s ’53 five points. The first is an elaborate ideology consisting of an official body of doctrine, so this would be communism. The official body of doctrine would be Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Stalin’s foundation of Leninism, any work that Lennon did or the national socialist ideology in Mein Keimp Two would be a single mass party typically led by one man, that’s the dictator, So communist party in China, in Russia, the Nazi party in Germany, and Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Khruschev. That’s typically what we think of when we think of the Totalitarian Regime. And then you have a system of terror which enacts this terror arbitrarily against enemies of the regime. So selected areas of the population who have been arbitrarily just pointed out as enemies. The terror can be psychological or physical, so not only is it kidnapping people, beating them up, shooting them extrajudicial murder, but it can also be the psychological fear of that happening to you. And then we have a technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly and control of communications. The key point there is technology. So that’s taking over forms of mass communication – radio, press, motion pictures, newspapers … all of that. So they control the message the people get from the media and they control what the people are thinking though that, and what they see and what they know through that. And then again, a technologically conditioned near complete monopoly of weaponry. So that would remove any chance of people being armed, people being able to rise up against the regime. Even though a lot of politicians use Nazi gun laws to kind of say ‘oh it wouldn’t happen’ Nazi gun laws were incredibly restrictive on who could have weaponry to protect the Nazi regime. People who were typically allowed weaponry were members of the Nazi party, or people who were sympathetic to it. People who, or designated groups, classes who they thought would not be sympathetic to Nazi regime simply legally were not allowed weaponry. And then the last point is essentially a controlled and directed economy. So, you’re thinking five-year plans and communist regimes and so on. So that’s the six-point framework that I typically use within my work on 20th century totalitarian regimes. But I think the key thing that I like to stress is quite often totalitarianism and authoritarianism is used interchangeably. Now I’ve spoken about this a lot in the past couple of weeks … authoritarianism is more of a modern term, but I think the thing that separates and the misconception about them being interchangeable terms is that there is ideology behind totalitarianism. The ideology behind the regime gives it legitimacy, it gives it staying power as a political body. Meanwhile, authoritarianism defines its legitimacy, derives its staying power from a singular leader, so those authoritarian regimes tend to collapse after that singular leader dies. And then it’s the use of technology prevents totalitarianism being something you could point to in the 18th, 17th, 16th, 15th centuries and so on. Because the technology within totalitarian regimes you just simply cannot replicate in any of those centuries. So something that I try and do as a researcher as well is try and get away from sensationalist terms so that we can understand what totalitarianism is so that we’re not just painting authoritarian regimes that we don’t like as a stronger term.

April: Thank you for defining all of that, I think that it gives us a good starting point, definitely. Why do you think it’s important to learn about these types of regimes, and how they work?

Jackson: I think it’s important for us to learn about it because it’s not gone away. So the more and more that we look at Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the more we can begin to see traits crop up in current regimes. I think we’re currently in a period of democratic backsliding, so there are less democratic countries now than there were fifteen years ago. So I think we need to be aware of what totalitarianism is so that we can be more careful about our usage of the term. Because I think there’s a lot of historical weight and legacy on the term totalitarianism, and I think misusing the term doesn’t do justice to the people who died under those regimes. And I think if we’re just using it carelessly, using it in a sensationalist manner, it’s not right. I reviewed Liz Truss book Ten Years to Save the West. Liz Truss was our prime minister here for just over a month, remarkably successful. That is a huge amount of sarcasm on that. But she used the terms interchangeably. And I criticized that because, like I said, it didn't give justice to people who died under Maoist China's cultural revolution doesn't give justice to the millions of people who died under Stalin, millions of people who died under Hitler. And I think we need to be careful so that that could be taken into account when we use it, because when we look at politicians such as Trump, Erdogan in Turkey, we use these terms without thinking.

And I think it can be incredibly offensive to some people. But also, if we understand it, we can also look at terms, at countries that I think are actually totalitarian in the 21st century. I've updated a framework, I can't remember my framework at the top of my mind, because I am an awful, awful academic with a poor memory. But I consider Xi Jinping's China today to be totalitarian, because it does very similar things, albeit in a 21st century way. And I think if we understand totalitarian regimes in the fifties, sixties, forties, thirties, we can understand regimes that could be today.

So quite a lot of academics within the field of totalitarianism, myself included, a lot of us consider Putin's Russia to be totalitarian. Most of us consider Xi Jinping’s to be totalitarian, Xi Jinping's China. But also some of us consider the Islamic state in Iran as a totalitarian regime, and maybe even the regime in Iraq.

So there is hallmarks which I think we need to understand, so we can understand how we taught these regimes, how we interact with these regimes, because not interacting with them can be equally as dangerous, if not more. So I think it helps us understand in a convoluted way, it helps us understand the geopolitical situation that we're currently in, with democratic backsliding increasing. But it also helps us be more respectful to our collective global past.

April: When thinking about how we were going to discuss Stalin’s regime, it seemed like it was too heavy of a topic for Door Key, where I do take things seriously, but still try to stay on the more lighter side. I think discussing Stalin through the movie The Death of Stalin is a good lens to discuss this topic through. The movie is a satire. So, while the subject is dark, and events in the movie are dark, it’s handled with humor, which makes it less difficult for people … and, well, by people I mean me … to talk about.

Don’t worry, I won’t be recapping the entire movie, but I wanted to do a recap of the very beginning of it, because I think it does a masterful job setting the scene and tone of the movie.

The movie starts out with an audience watching a musical performance. Behind the scenes, two men are in a room. The phone rings. The man who answers speaks nervously into the phone. ‘Yes, I can call back in 17 minutes’, and nervously tries to confirm the callback number, only for the call to abruptly end.

‘I’m to call Stalin’s office in 17 minutes’, he tell the other man. ‘Wait’, asks the second man, ‘Is that 17 minutes from when they called, or is it 17 minutes after you hung up?’ ‘I don’t know!’ gasps the first man.

Both men are visibly upset and anxious about this. Then we see Stalin and Lavrenti Beria casually going over a list of name of people. As Stalin and Beria are talking, the camera switches to Nikita Khrushchev, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Gregory Malenkov, who were in the next room laughingly talking about throwing live grenades at prisoners in Stalingrad.

Beria and Stalin finished talking about the list they were going over, and Beria gives it to some guards with instructions on which order to shoot the people who are on the list and even what to do with some of the bodies. So by this point, it's clear that the casual attitude about people's lives is why the two men answering the phones before were so nervous. The guards go to the homes of the people on the list, and as they're beating on the door to take them away, it's clear that the people being taken aren't surprised by this.

They’re piled into cars that speed away. Then we go back to the men having the crisis about calling Stalin back in 17 minutes. The performance is ending just as they call Stalin back.

Stalin say he wants a recording of that performance, he’ll send someone to come pick it up, and hangs up. The performance that had just ended wasn’t recorded. It was live.

The men panic, and make the audience all sit back down so they can record the performance, saying ‘Nobody leaves! Don’t worry, nobody’s going to get killed!’

Starting the movie out this way really show how nervous and on edge everyone is. People are walking on eggshells trying to anticipate what Stalin wants, the casual cruelness in the way Stalin and his government acts, the way that people are so resigned to the possibility of being rounded up to be tortured and/or killed in the middle of the night that it’s commonplace … like they expect it.

This whole movie is over-the-top like this, and I love it. Another example of the regime poorly handling thing is Stalin has a stroke, and is in dire need of a doctor. ‘If only we hadn’t put away all those highly competent doctors for treason.’

They then round up a group of doctors that are left. They're all either retired or very young or incompetent. It's clear that Stalin's stroke is going to lead to his death, but none of them want to be the one to say that they're all afraid.

Jackson: I think that part of the movie is one of my favorite parts of the movie. This whole beginning part, because that scene with the concert actually happened. And it really shows, like you said, the fear that people had about the consequences of what might happen to them. 

But also with the doctors. Stalin’s death is his own fault, owning to his own paranoia and anxieties. And it’s quite interesting to see how that all plays out at the beginning of this movie, where Stalin’s completely unaware of his consequences, of his own actions. And then you have that whole fear as well.

Those lists that Beria and Stalin are talking about, some of them had no names on it. Some of them were just numbers. And the NKVD and Beria had to go and just collect that amount of people.

And that was the end of that list. And that whole part, as well as a reference to Stalin about to start another terror in the fifties. So I think it’s probably one of the best depictions of the fear that people had in Stalin’s regime.

April: So Stalin’s daughter Svltana and Stalin’s son Vasily are depicted in this movie, and I find it so funny. The word Nepo Babies comes to mind.

And Vasily is like, he’s trying to coach this hockey team because the National hockey team had crashed in a plane and all died. And he didn’t want anyone to know that. So he’s trying to teach these other people how to play hockey. And I have a quote that he says that just cracks me up. He says ‘Soviet planes do not crash, and Stalin’s son does not f@$! up!’

Jackson: He’s probably my second favorite character in this whole movie because he was, he was genuinely such a liability for Stalin and Stalin just had to deal with it. Yeah, he was a complete and utter liability and a massive drunk. So the depiction of that you see of Vasily is rather, is rather true. He does in actual events, he does turn up soon than he does in the movie. But again, even when he turns up in real life at this situation, he is still a drunk liability, which is so hilarious how it’s so true to life. But he must have been an incredibly stressful person to be around.

April: I imagine! Oh, my gosh! So Stalin dies and the rest of the movie is his cabinet … is that even the correct word?  

Jackson: Yes. So you would have had the Central Committee part of the Politburo. So the people there are part of that Central Committee. The main people who are running the Soviet Union, and when they’re talking about how they have to vote for things unanimously, that is how thing were done. The whole Central Committee and Politburo had to vote unanimously for certain options. But it’s a very interesting dynamic between those characters.

April: Yes. The rest of the movie is his Central Committee trying to do damage control as they look out for themselves and undercut other central committee members. They all want to be Stalin’s successor.

I had this thought while watching. It kind of makes me think of Game of Thrones with all the side-alliances everyone’s forming, the jockeying for power, the vague or sometimes even blatant threats, obviously very different … but at the same time, I could see the mechanizations.

Jackson: I completely agree. There’s so much maneuvering there to try and get yourself in the best position. But I think something that the movie does really, really well at playing at is the fear that all of these characters have about what’s going to happen to them next. None of them ever knew that they were particularly safe under Stalin anyway.

And Beria was perhaps in real life, the most likely to die next if Stalin was to remain. There’s the way that Armando Onucci capitalizes on that fear that all of those Politburo members would have had at that time.

April: So they have a committee meeting to try to decide what to do after Stalin dies and to decide who’s going to take Stalin’s place.

I couldn’t help but laugh during this committee meeting when everyone decided that Khrushchev was going to be in charge of Stalin’s funeral, even though he clearly doesn’t want to do this, ‘I don’t have time to do that. What the hell do I know about funerals?’ He’s unanimously voted in charge. I’ve been in committee meetings and have seen this exact thing happen. Every second of that committee meeting was so real and so funny to me. And there’s a saying, about, like, the banality of evil and how it’s just like … it just happens, you know … people are just, you know, they’re just having committee meetings …

Jackson: And although, although work committee meeting very rarely end in a unanimous decision, I must I must end that.

April: Okay. And then Stalin’s son Vasily shows up to the funeral. He’s drunk, he has a gun, and he wants to speak at the funeral. There’s lots of conversations between the Committee members as they jockey for power, try to place blame for things on other people. Everything is complete chaus behind the scenes, and it’s hilarious. There’s a quote from Milankov, where he says ‘Would you do me a favor and just nod as I’m speaking? People are looking to me for reassurance, and I have no idea what’s going on’. Like, that’s some real Veep, the show Veep level chaos.

The day after the funeral, Beria, who seems to be the most evil and underhanded of this evil, underhanded group, is grabbed. They accuse him of treason, and anti-Soviet behavior. He’s found guilty, and sentenced to be be shot. Sidenote: there’s no trial. It’s just ‘Here are the charges. You are found to be guilty. Here’s your sentence’. Then, they literally pour gasoline on his body and light it on fire. It’s brutal.

Jackson: This is the point in the movie where there’s a little bit of fictionalization going on. So this definitely highlights this point.

And I think I know what Anu is trying to do. He’s trying to kind of put a metaphor across of how quick this would have been in political sense, but it was a lot slower. So it happened over several months. There’s a lot of maneuvering there to try and get different communist politicians on board. Factionalism was something that was frowned upon massively. So this happened across several months.

Beria did have a trial, but there was no defense. He wasn’t allowed to appeal. He was summarily executed, just not in the way that it was done here, because, again, this is trying to show how much of a mess this was, but also trying to big Khrushchev up as someone who you could believe takes on over afterwards and tries to show Malenkov as this weak leader that’s succeeded Stalin.

It’s definitely more drawn out than this was. It doesn’t all happen over Stalin’s funeral.

April: I did not know that. So Khrushchev seems to be running things bylls the end. He tells Svltlana that her brother will remain in Moscow, where he can be watched over. But she is to to to Vienna. And, as the movie ends, he’s walking with one of the Committee members, and he says ‘Now we can turn the corner. Yep, put all the bloodshed behind us. I’m worried about Malinkov though - can we trust him?’

‘Can you ever trust a weak man?’

This interaction ends the movie, but shows that NO, they haven’t turned a corner at all. This is further spelled out in text at the end: ‘In 1953, the Central Committee took control of the Soviet Union. In 1956, Khrushchev moved to demote other members of the party, including Molotov and Malinkov. He became head of the Soviet Government and Commander in Chief until he removal in 1964 by Leonid Reznov’.

Jackson: I think that’s a really key point there. The three years between Berio’s death and ‘56, where Khrushchev properly takes over, firmly takes over. There is this period of political maneuvering again, where Khrushchev is moving himself into power, empowering himself and trying to undermine others. And in ‘56, he does do a speech. The 20th Party Congress was probably one of the most important speeches in Russian history. It’s a speech about de-Stalinization. So he speaks about trying to remove the Stalinist elements from the party, remove the Stalinist elements from Russia.

And he pins a lot of the crimes of Stalin’s era on Stalin, so absolves himself and other Committee members pretty much from being involved in that, and then puts a lot of it on Stalin’s door. And then he is able to empower himself. And not only does he demote Molotov and Malinkov, people like Kaganovich, who are incredibly key to Khrushchev’s own rise to power, are also demoted.

So Khrushchev was able to maneuver himself into an incredibly powerful position by ‘56 and to be an incredibly powerful leader of the Soviet Union, but also to be a somewhat liberalizing force.

April: Thank you for all of that. I’m so grateful that this is your specialty, because I’m way out of my element, and I really appreciate the extra context and information you’re giving!

Jackson: It’s always nice to contextualize a movie such as this. I love Armando Onucci’s work, so I love Veep, but he did a show here called The Thick of It as well, which very much satiricalized the Labour government from probably the ‘07 to maybe 2005 to 2010 Labour government. And when you know those, you know what actually happened in the context for it, Anucci’s work becomes even more funny because of the metaphor and how he speeds things up to kind of show, show things. So, you know, this is, this is genuinely one of my favorite movies.

April: I’m so glad! And then the credits of the movie role, which is pictures of people in the movie, but their faces are scratched out or obscured, or they’re just cropped out. This is in reference to something that actually happened at the time. People were ‘disappeared’. Any record that they ever existed was erased. I’ve seen some real pictures from where this really happened, and it’s terrifying to me. I think doing that here, no commentary, just the pictures of the actors faces getting scratched out or deleted as the credits rolled … was very effective.

Jackson: Yeah, I think it was one if the key things within Stalin’s great purge, because not only is it records of them … photos and so on … and getting rid of them from the political record, it was also in terms of mentioning people you weren’t allowed to mention, people who had been erased or disappeared during The Great Terror. And its a lot of things where Orwell gets that inspiration within 1984, where you can’t talk about people who’ve just disappeared from the party. 

And his … I think it’s Ogilvy … I forget his first name, but Ogilvy the pilot in 1984, when the character Winston is having to write a news story about this character, things like that really highlight just the extent of how intense this, this system of terror was, but also how intense that monopoly of communications and propaganda was.

April: Like I said earlier, Door Key doesn’t usually cover subjects as dark as this, but I think this is a fascinating and important subject. We took a very dark, serious subject and talked about it with humor. I kind of look at the humor as the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine that is the subject of Stalin go down. And I really appreciate you agreeing to approach the subject like this. That made me so happy! Like, I thought about, you know, talking about this movie, and I was like ‘Is that weird? I don’t know’. And you responded like ‘Yes, that sounds great!’ I was like ‘Oh yay, good!'

Jackson: I think when we, we want to talk about a specialism, very rarely do I think a very fortunate position as a historian is very rarely do we have a comedy movie about our specialism, and about something we want to look at. And the very fact that I have two. So I have Death of Stalin, which is one of my favorite movies, and then Jojo Rabbit, which is another one of my favorite movies. I’m incredibly lucky, really. And talking about dark subjects with humor such as this, I think, is so, so important because a lot of the time you look at things and you can … it just can be incredibly depressing looking at primary sources, looking at diary entries. You know, I’ve seen the lists that Stalin and the Central Committee have signed. It can be incredibly depressing. So having things like this, and conversations like this is incredibly refreshing. I mean, at the moment I’m writing part of my chapter on the Nazi regime, and again, that is incredibly depressing. So being able to have conversations like this is brilliant, refreshing.

April: Oh good, good! So you and I weren’t the only one to try to find humor in all of this though … people who were actually living through this time in the Soviet Union found relief in humor. Sometimes it was a way to vent stress, frustration, or fear. Or it could even be used as a way to see if the person you were talking to saw things the way you did. Here are a few jokes from that time that I found:

‘A peasant visits the Bolshevik leader Kalanin in Moscow, and asks why the pace of modernization is so relentless. Kalanin takes him to the window and points at the passing tram ‘You see, if we have a dozen trams at the moment, after five years, we’ll have hundreds.’ The peasant returns to his collective farm, and as his comrades gather around him, clamoring to hear what he’s learned, he looks around for inspiration and points to the nearby cemetery, declaring ‘You see those graves? After five years, there will be thousands!’

Another joke:

‘Stalin is speaking in front of workers ‘I am prepared to give my blood away drop by drop for the good of the working class.’ An anonymous note is passed from the audience: ‘Dear Comrade Stalin: Why drag things on? Just give all of it away at once!’

‘Stalin lost his pipe. He called Barrera, Chief of the KGB. ‘What is the matter? Why is everything disappearing?’ Barrera went pale. 2 hours later, he called with the news ‘47 people have been arrested. My first Deputy is conducting the investigation!’ 1 hour later, Stalin told Barrera that his pipe cleaning brush had also disappeared. At the end of the day, Barrera reported ‘85 suspects have been arrested. I am personally heading the investigation.’ The next morning, the cleaning lady found both lost items. Stalin called Barrera with the good news. ‘What a pity’, responded Barrera, ‘all the suspects except for one have confessed!’ 

There were also some simple jokes were people would pick party slogans and say ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin!’, or ‘Life had become more joyous!’

I love those old jokes! And they were real jokes that were told at the time. And I think it says a lot about how people thought and viewed things back then.

Jackson: I really like, I really like them. And particularly that first one. I thought the first one was quite funny because it really, it really did happen. Hundreds of tram in the cities, but thousands of graves elsewhere. So I think it was rather wrapped and on the nose.

April: Yes! Jackson, thank you so much for coming on Door Key to talk about Totalitarianism and Totalitarian regimes with me. I really appreciate it! I’m so grateful to be able to talk about this with someone who specializes in it. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m really grateful for that, too! Would you tell people where to find you on Social Media?

Jackson: Yes, of course. And thank you very much for having me on again. I’ve really, really enjoyed this episode. Talk about one of my favorite movies, and also the chance to talk about Totalitarianism because no one wants to talk to me about it again at home because I talk about it too much. So you can find History With Jackson and myself on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok as well because I’m modern. So I sounded so old when I said that. I shouldn’t have said that. But it’s History With Jackson on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok and History With Jackson on LinkedIn and then on Twitter because of, oh sorry, it’s X now. I have to make sure I get that right, On C, it’s History w Jackson because of the character limits on handles. So on there you can find all the content that I do, links to podcasts, and so on, and then www dot historyread dot co dot UK for everything else. But yeah, thank you very much for having me on and give me the chance to talk about some of the things that I love more than anything else in this world.

And that was my conversation with Jackson van Uden! I really enjoyed our talk and I learned a lot as well, which I always really appreciate!

I’ll put links to Jackson’s website, his podcast, and his Social Media in the show notes. Be sure to check all al that out! Jackson, thank you so much for coming on Door Key to talk about a great movie with me, but also for sharing your knowledge and expertise with me - I really appreciate it!