"Five Minutes of Fire": Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jason Colvin, I'm d Graves.
<v Speaker 2>Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
<v Speaker 1>are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
<v Speaker 1>the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
<v Speaker 1>at a time, which is about to link with the song,
<v Speaker 1>so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
<v Speaker 1>us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 2>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be covering today.
<v Speaker 1>Joseph Stalin, Mallenkough and naserv okay d. What can you
<v Speaker 1>tell me about Justice Stalin if you didn't know, was
<v Speaker 1>the leader of the Soviet Union for decades. Came along
<v Speaker 1>after Lennon in nineteen fifty three, he and his inner
<v Speaker 1>circle of folks decided to have a party. Now, his
<v Speaker 1>inner circle still feared him because he was one of
<v Speaker 1>the worst human being in the history of the world.
<v Speaker 1>Uh huh. He is known to have murdered or had
<v Speaker 1>sent to the Gulag, sent to Siberia, not hundreds, not thousands,
<v Speaker 1>but millions. As it turned out in nineteen fifty three.
<v Speaker 1>His paranoia found its focus on doctors. He thought that
<v Speaker 1>the doctors were trying to kill people, and there was
<v Speaker 1>a big plot, and so a lot of doctors were
<v Speaker 1>imprisoned and tortured. Right as a matter of fact, his
<v Speaker 1>own private physician this night that he's having this party
<v Speaker 1>with his inner circle, is being tortured in his basement.
<v Speaker 1>So he is with these guys. Khrushchev is one of
<v Speaker 1>the guys. Bera is one of the guys. Maltov is
<v Speaker 1>one of the guys. Maltov. You recognize that name, Maltov cocktail,
<v Speaker 1>You got it. So Maltov was a propaganda guy, and
<v Speaker 1>so he announced on the radio that they were dropping
<v Speaker 1>food packages to the Fins, when what they were actually
<v Speaker 1>dropping were incendiary bombs. And so the Fins said, okay,
<v Speaker 1>I guess this must be Maltov bread baskets. Well, when
<v Speaker 1>they fought back, they would have the bottles with the
<v Speaker 1>incendiary devices in them that they would hurl at the
<v Speaker 1>Soviet tanks, and they said, we need a drink to
<v Speaker 1>go along with our Maltov bread. So this will be
<v Speaker 1>our Molotov cocktail. And that's how that name came to
<v Speaker 1>be well at four am. Finally, after all of this partying,
<v Speaker 1>everybody goes home and Stalin tells his staff, I'm exhausted.
<v Speaker 1>Do not come into my room unless you hear me
<v Speaker 1>moving around and I'm awake. Okay, Well, they didn't hear him,
<v Speaker 1>and they still didn't hear him, and they still didn't
<v Speaker 1>hear him. And if you know Stalin, like everybody knows him,
<v Speaker 1>you don't want to break his rules. So finally, a
<v Speaker 1>housekeeper who had been with him for years is tasked
<v Speaker 1>with going in and checking on him. When she goes in,
<v Speaker 1>she sees him lying on the floor, breathing but unresponsive,
<v Speaker 1>and soaking in his own piss. She calls his inner circle,
<v Speaker 1>who come back, and they don't know what to do.
<v Speaker 1>They don't do anything for nearly twenty four hours except
<v Speaker 1>sit him on a couch and wait and see what happens.
<v Speaker 1>When they finally call the doctors in, the doctors are terrible.
<v Speaker 1>They're shaking with fear about this Stalin waking up and
<v Speaker 1>then doing something horrible to them, so they don't know
<v Speaker 1>what to do. They start calling on the doctors who
<v Speaker 1>are actually in prison. Hey, can you help us out here?
<v Speaker 1>I who realized this guy stuck in here in tortured you,
<v Speaker 1>but can you help us save him? He, after five
<v Speaker 1>days of suffering, ultimately dies And I gotta tell you,
<v Speaker 1>it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Tell me
<v Speaker 1>about Malankov.
<v Speaker 2>So that goes right into my story on Georgie Malakoff.
<v Speaker 2>He was a Soviet politician who briefly succeeded Joseph Stalin
<v Speaker 2>on March the fifth of nineteen fifty three as the
<v Speaker 2>leader of the Soviet Union. Now he had some personal
<v Speaker 2>connection to Vladimir Lenin that allowed him to propel his career,
<v Speaker 2>and because he became the overseer of records, he got
<v Speaker 2>to know Joseph Stalin. He was deeply involved in the
<v Speaker 2>Great Party Purge in the nineteen thirties, and then when
<v Speaker 2>Stalin died in nineteen fifty three, he became the leader
<v Speaker 2>of the Soviet Union. After a few weeks, he was
<v Speaker 2>forced to yield his position to Nikita Khrushchev. He later
<v Speaker 2>tried to organize a coup against Krushie and was expelled
<v Speaker 2>from the Communist Party altogether. He served the remaining years
<v Speaker 2>of his life as the manager of a hydro electric plant,
<v Speaker 2>and as Stalin's collaborator, I would say that he also
<v Speaker 2>has the blood of millions upon his head. All right,
<v Speaker 2>d well, can you tell me about Nasar?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? So, Nasar is Gamal abdel Nasser. If you are
<v Speaker 1>from Egypt, you might look upon this guy as kind
<v Speaker 1>of the George Washington of the modern Egypt. He rose
<v Speaker 1>through military ranks. Obviously, Egypt had a very tumultuous history.
<v Speaker 1>One of the things that occurred was the Anglo Egyptian
<v Speaker 1>Treaty of nineteen thirty six, in which the United Kingdom
<v Speaker 1>had the right to maintain its military forces in the
<v Speaker 1>Suez Canal zone. That's going to come up here in
<v Speaker 1>a little bit. You got Nassar was part of a
<v Speaker 1>political group and a police and military group that ultimately
<v Speaker 1>had a revolution. What happened was on the twenty fifth
<v Speaker 1>of January nineteen fifty two, there were repeated at suicide
<v Speaker 1>bombers those type of things on the British forces occupying
<v Speaker 1>the Suez Canal. Seven thousand British soldiers then came and
<v Speaker 1>attacked the main police station in Canal City, is Malia.
<v Speaker 1>What resulted then was a huge riot where the buyers
<v Speaker 1>were started all over Cairo left seventy six people dead.
<v Speaker 1>But afterwards Nasser published a simple six point program to
<v Speaker 1>dismantle the feudalist government and British influence in Egypt. Soon
<v Speaker 1>he made that happen. He ultimately became the second president
<v Speaker 1>of Egypt and put together a bunch of the disparate
<v Speaker 1>Arab countries into what became known as the United Arab Republic. Ultimately,
<v Speaker 1>around nineteen seventy, everything kind of fell apart. That's awesome.
<v Speaker 1>That's something I'd never heard of before. Yeah, Okay, guys,
<v Speaker 1>that does it for today's episode. Join us next time
<v Speaker 1>for five minutes of fire