I welcome Professor Sean McMeekin, Bard College.

Sean is an author of many historical narratives over the 20th century timeline.

And here to four, I've talked to the professor about his explication of the events of July 1914,

prior to the First War, the Great War, it was called.

Now we turn to a byproduct of the catastrophe of the Great War, which is the 1930s and 1940s, the period where all of Europe was transformed into fear and loathing of two very powerful

dictators, monsters. Adolf Hitler in Germany, but before that, Joseph Stalin, Jugashvili,

in the Soviet Union. The new book is Stalin's war, a new history of World War II. It begins with an explanation of Stalin's

viewpoint of the world. He inherited through machinations and scalduggery and backstabbing. He

inherited the control of the Communist Party, the apparatus in Moscow, upon Lenin's death.

What he did with that was derive one theory of the world, I learned from the professor,

and it was inherited from Stalin himself, from Lenin himself.

But we begin with who Joseph Stalin is, what you need to know about his personality, how he

first came to Lenin's attention as a man who was an up-and-comer revolutionary.

Professor, congratulations.

The book is massive.

It's an enormous amount of detail, but there's stories within stories.

And we begin with, how did Vladimir Lenin, Ulyanov, first learn of Joseph Stalin, the Bandit?

Good evening to you.

Good evening, John. And thank you so much for having me on once again.

Well, Stalin, it's true, really first came to Lenin's attention after the notorious Tiflis

heist conducted essentially in broad daylight of a kind of a bank transfer, transport what we might

call an armored car. Now, I mean, I should say a couple of things about this. We shouldn't get the

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