I'm John Batcher. Josh Ireland's here, the death of Trotsky, the true story of the plot to kill Stalin's

greatest enemy. Trotsky is back in the revolution and he's leading the civil war.

Stalin, on the other hand, a man who's not well educated, though he did go to seminary, a man who

has grievances against everyone in the world eventually is a product of a peasant family

and a mother who beat him to make him come out right. The difficulty with summing up

Stalin is that he had disabilities that certainly didn't hold him back in life, he became a very prominent leader of men.

Was he also charismatic, Josh?

I don't think he was charismatic in the same sort of classic sense as Trotsky.

So I think Trotsky's charisma was a very, I guess, sort of 18th century charisma,

the sort of person who could stand up and inspire people

just by the quality of his speech, his eloquence, his appearance.

You know, that Trotsky was always a kind of dandy, you know, he wore beautiful white linen suits,

and a pound's nears, and he had this wonderful sweep of thick hair.

Whereas Trotsky, Stalin was sort of short and laconic,

and he walked with a limb, and he had some thick peasant mustache and pockmarked cheeks from

smallpox. So he, and he never really, you know, he wasn't a man that felt that it was

necessary to speak unless he absolutely had something to say.

And I think Trotsky's big mistake right from the very first time he met Stalin was to write Trot to start, was to write Stalin off to sort of, he described him as being like a grey blur.

Because I think for Stratzky, unless you could speak,

you know, off the cuff beautifully for 25 minutes, you know, you weren't worth considering.

But what Stalin was, was, I mean, even if he didn't have the same sort of dazzling range of

educations, Trotsky, he was a relentless auto-odictor. You know, he thought, he learned,

...