Stalin’s Statues

This is a bonus episode for Noiser+ subscribers. Real Dictators continues to be available for free wherever you get your shows. We’ll be back with the Fidel Castro story on April 30th.

Dictators throughout history have put up statues… often of themselves. This was particularly the case in the Soviet Union. Why was it that effigies of Lenin and Stalin became quite so commonplace? What do these statues tell us about how these dictators projected power, and continued to wield it - even in death? To find out more, Duncan Barrett spoke to Alex von Tunzelmann - author of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History.