Discovering Your Grandfather Was Joseph Stalin's Bodyguard

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2020

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Delving into your family history can reveal many surprises, but for Russian-American author Alex Halberstadt, it meant learning about his grandfather's experience as Joseph Stalin's bodyguard.

As the last living member of Stalin's security revenue, his grandfather, who lives in Ukraine, spoke of the fear of coming to work every day with the possibility you could be executed in a purge. Halberstad also revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother’s home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers’ wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records

His book, Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, is an investigation into the fragile boundary between history and biography. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suffering, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives.

Transcript

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0:00.0	History is just a bunch of names and dates and facts.
0:15.6	It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why
0:19.4	we got here.
0:21.0	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange,
0:26.1	and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.
0:29.9	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
0:40.4	In today's episode and episodes in the past, I've looked at the topic of family history,
0:45.3	and that's usually involved warky rose, Holocaust survivors, or in general people who overcame
0:49.8	incredible lots.
0:51.4	But sometimes family history can be a lot darker.
0:53.7	That's the case in today's episode, because this family history directly involves Joseph
0:58.1	Stalin.
0:59.1	Today's guest is Alex Halberstad, he's the author of the book Young Heroes of the Soviet Union,
1:03.8	and his grandfather was the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin.
1:07.4	He protected Stalin for several years, survived numerous purges, even though he thought that
1:12.0	he could die any day.
1:13.4	And he had to deal with the conflict of being a patriotic Soviet, but directly saw the
1:18.3	purges that Stalin did, and the tortures and executions ordered by him and his generals
1:23.2	and all sorts of horrific things.
1:25.4	Alex is a Russian-American author, and he went to Ukraine to talk with his grandfather
1:29.0	about those experiences, but also talked with other family members about the trauma they
1:32.8	experienced in the Soviet Union.
	...

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