... which would, you know, be shared.

Well, Roosevelt with tremendous arrogance thought that he was so charming that he'd be able to charm Stalin into becoming his friend.

You know, [laughs] make Stalin your friend? I mean, you know, you might as well make a tiger your friend.

I mean, you know, it was, uh...

Um, and, um, Churchill of course was more realistic in that way.

Churchill was unrealistic in others.

But anyway, he was more realistic about the real threat of what Stalin wanted, which was of course to impose a cordon sanine- sanitaire, uh, and this was the origins of the Cold War.

75,000 American vehicles

So we need to get into both of those.

Well, there's been a considerable debate, obviously amongst historians, uh, about where the Russian method of warfare, uh, has originated.

Some will say that it goes back to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, with, uh, uh, the sweeping in from the steppe, from coming from the, uh, Far East, and the way that the original Rus settlements, uh, were then attacked and, uh, in many ways this was the start of a continual warfare which lasted for a long time.

The Mongols certainly were the ones who believed that fire and sword, uh, laying waste, uh, mass rape, um, was an element, a natural element of warfare.

Uh, and this actually became almost a, a, a central element in the Russian view of warfare, of conspicuous cruelty, I think one can call it.

Uh, and the interesting thing is, of course, Europe was just as bad in the 17th century.

One thinks of the horrors of the wars of religion, uh, as bad as anything that had happened, uh, in Russia up till that time.

[laughs]

Troops taken prisoner are sent to German work camps or left to starve.

It becomes the most pitiless campaign ever launched, I think, in modern history.

They were rounded up in their thousands and hardly given any food.

In fact, they would just throw loaves over the barbed wire and laugh when the prisoners fought amongst themselves because they were starving.

So there's a huge encirclement battle at Kyiv, one of the biggest battles thus far in the war.

With the panzer groups coming from the north, from the central axis, and also in the south, they capture 600,000 troops.

It's staggering.

One's never imagined a battle like that in the past.

So could you explain the context of how he is able to cr- climb the hierarchy in St. Petersburg eventually to the royal family?

His rise in the social scale and in his, in influence and power and so forth was fairly dramatic and fairly rapid, but it came about through a series of fortunate meeting.

This woman in Kazan who then reintroduced him to a local bishop who was very influential, that gave him this spread of contacts amongst a number of sort of local grandees.

But it was the bishop passing him on to an even more influential bishop in St. Petersburg, which really led to his sudden rise and introduction into royal circles.

He was first of all introduced to the Grand Duke Nicholas, Nikolasha as he was known, through Nikolasha's wife, w- who was this Montenegrin princess.

And she already had a tremendous taste for spiritualism.

She'd been in Paris, and she had been the one who originally had introduced this other, this forerunner of Rasputin, known as Monsieur PhilippeWho was a sort of French charlatan, frankly, but who had tremendous influence over women in France.

What happens with his purported healings, Rasputin's purported healings of Alexei that really grants him an intense level of trust among the royal family?

Well, how, how do you explain the tsarina's relationship with him? Is she taken with his eyes and his manner and his, uh, the Russian peasantry appeal that he has, even though she's, she's German in her own, uh, background? I- or was it all about her son and her maternal instincts that she's trying to reach for any kinda hope that would let her son have a better health outcome because of his hemophilia?

Well, you're quite right.

I mean, uh, you've got, uh, that, that's just about the list, and that's [chuckles] an important one in a way.

Yes, she was attracted by his voice.

I think a lot of the time, uh, he was talking close to gibberish.

I mean, a mixture of platitudes and, and so forth.

But his obvious spirituality, even though it was combined at times with the most appalling lasciviousness, uh, obviously not with the empress herself.

Yeah.

What was that journey that took him to the center of imperial power?

Well, he announced to his wife, poor thing, that, you know, "I'm going to leave you because I'm gonna go off as a wandering pilgrim," a strannik.

You know, this was in search of enlightenment of God and so forth.

And I mean, there were probably around at, at this particular period, I'm talking now right at the beginning, 1903, 1904, there were about a million Russians wandering the roads dressed in rags and carrying chains.

It was a form of sort of mortification of the flesh, and they walked from monastery to monastery, where they would pray, and they would then work, I say, a little bit for, say, a peasant along the way who, which would given them enough food to carry on to the next place.

And he visited not just sacred places in Russia of holy monasteries or churches, but even to mo- all the way to Mount Athos in Greece.

And then he was in Kazan on the River Volga, one of the sort of great ancient cities of, uh, o-of Russia, a Tatar city.

Do we know much about how Nicholas and Alexander received the news?

There is this fabulous detail in the book where a witness says of him that he looked women in the eye and at his gaze they melted, but he wouldn't look men in the eye.

That is absolutely true.

It's also one of the reasons why men, I think, also disliked him.

Because, of course, Rasputin felt that he should address everybody in the same way, whether they were a princess or a chambermaid, and he would use the familiar tea version of speaking, of address.

And the men felt that this was upsetting the social order in a bad way and resented it.

But women, on the other hand, found this refreshing and new.

And they also were not just interested.

Stay out of the war.

There is this fabulous detail in the book where a witness says of him that he looked women in the eye and at his gaze they melted, but he wouldn't look men in the eye.

That is absolutely true.

It's also one of the reasons why men, I think, also disliked him.

Because, of course, Rasputin felt that he should address everybody in the same way, whether they were a princess or a chambermaid, and he would use the familiar tea version of speaking, of address.

And the men felt that this was upsetting the social order in a bad way and resented it.

But women, on the other hand, found this refreshing and new.

And they also were not just interested.

Stay out of the war.

Well, they were thrilled

with their first daughter, Olga, who is the one they took with them to visit Queen Victoria at Balmoral.

But then by the time of the second daughter... she immediately saw the faces at the birth of all the faces around of all the wet nurses and so forth and doctors that she got it wrong, it was another daughter.

So she was obviously getting more and more tense and not surprisingly one Canadian sympathised with her for that because we can imagine the pressure that she was under.

And so that is why, of course, he was vulnerable to a charlatan like Vacheaux.

I mean, but it was unbelievable the naivety, the way that she was prepared to believe.

You know, when he left, he gave her a little bell and he said, this bell will ring when anybody who is dangerous to you comes near.

Tell us a little bit about what happened and I suppose why it was so foundational for him.

we've been kind of, um, insulated from that across much of the West?

Well, we've totally underestimated the effect of perceived humiliation, whether on China or on, uh, Russia, and we are now, I'm afraid, paying the price for our complacency, uh, during all of that, uh, era, the post-Cold War era, uh, stretching really from 1989, um, through to, uh, basically, you know, a year ago from now or less than a year ago from now.

So all of these, um, elements, this, uh, this, this sort of failure to appreciate how the rest of the world is going to react.

I mean, the way that in, for example, 1989, 1990, uh, we thought that, uh, the world from now on was gonna be peaceful, that there wasn't gonna be none, none of the end of history, all of those cliches, which of course have always been misinterpreted both at the time and in retrospect, um, were taking place.

Uh, we failed to see how, for example, Putin was going to, uh, bitterly resent what had happened and was going to basically, uh, try to claw back and get back what had been not just the Soviet empire, but certainly the Russian empire of earlier on, because Putin is not just a, uh, a Cold War warrior of the Soviet sort.

Um, his ideology, um, with Vladimir Medinsky and, uh, Dugin, um, is very much the Russian imperial, uh, Slav idea, uh, that they have the right through moral superiority and religion and all the rest of it to control the whole of the Eurasian landmass, as they say, from Vladivostok to Dublin.

What do you make of the difference in how we recall the ends of those two different spheres in that great war?

Well, in both cases, I mean, it was like a war on two separate planets, uh, in many ways, with very little connection between them.