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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop.

Well, today we open our series looking at the personalities, motivations and style of the great warlords of the greatest war the world has ever seen.

Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin.

What an extraordinary collection of individuals they were,

crystallizing in their beings the very best and the very worst that humanity was capable of.

Their personalities could scarcely have been more contrasted, yet fate put the destiny of the world in their hands and their characters played an enormous part in shaping the outcome

of the conflict.

We're going to open the series today by looking at perhaps the most mysterious of that

quartet, Stalin. Born Joseph Dukeshvili in Georgia in 1878, the son of a bankrupt, drunken,

wife-beating cobbler. In 1944, he's been in more or less uncontested supreme power since the early 1930s as General Secretary

of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He secured his dictatorship by murder and fear

and is responsible for the deaths of millions of his own countrymen. Millions more have died

due to the appalling incompetence of his initial direction of the war with the Germans.

Yet, in the spring of 1944, Stalin is riding high.

The Red Army, after staggering losses and a chain of seemingly catastrophic defeats

that brought the Germans to the gates of Moscow, has turned the tide.

Victory now looks certain, though still distant. Hitler,

...