This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchler.

I welcome Professor Sean McMacon, 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

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 skullduggery 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-coming 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

heist conducted essentially in broad daylight of a kind of a bank 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 idea

that Stalin was actually out there physically assaulting the bank guards. He was much more of a

kind of behind-the-scenes operator. He was behind the plot. That is, he planned it out. He did

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