I'm John Batchel with Professor Sean McMeekin to overthrow the world the rise and fall and rise of communism.

Lenin dies in 1924 after a series of strokes.

Joseph Stalin, real name Joshvili, he's a peasant family out of what is now Georgia, Barry, Georgia.

He comes to power because he's the man, the managing editor of the Politburo.

You go to him to get hired.

And once Lenin is gone, O'Yenoff is dead, he asserts control and eventually we'll take

complete command of the Soviet Union after 1928.

And he imposes a five-year plan that leads to starvation

and failure. However, he's a very strong voice in the world scale eventually. He sends out his spies

everywhere, including the United States. And Sean notes especially the intellectual property theft that was part of the mission that

Stalin sent his spies to the U.S. to steal every airplane factory plan they can find.

That was the building of the Soviet Union.

It's surprising how we see the same complaint about the building of the People's Republic of China.

However, what we need to know about Stalin is what he made of Leninism and Leninism or Marxist Leninism.

They reversed back and forth.

And was there such a thing as Stalinism?

Because the other man that Sean writes about is men named, we call him Trotsky, who is much more involved early on, the revolution of 1905, revolution in 1917, and builds the Red Army that becomes the master of the Eurasian continent.

These two men were in tension from the first.

Was it an ideological tension on or they just hate each other?

Well, I think it's a bit of both.

Although Trotsky was far more consistent in his ideological vision,

effectively the best way to summarize is just kind of

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