Lavrentiy Beria, the Chief of Stalin's Secret Police Who Was Executed as a Traitor

“Let me have a man for one night, and I’ll have him confessing he’s the king of England,” Lavrentiy Beria bragged to his colleague, Nikita Khrushchev. He was intelligent and intriguing and cynical. He was also violent, unethical, and prone to using ruthless measures, including kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder. And he was almost the ruler of the Soviet Union after the Second World War – until his former colleagues executed him for treason.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Let me have a man
for one night, and I'll have him confessing he's the
King of England. Law Renti Barrier once bragged to his
colleague Nikita Khrushchev. By all accounts, Barria was a bad person.

(00:28):
I mean he was a bad person, capitalized, he was immoral,
he was unethical, and he was almost the ruler of
the Soviet Union after the Second World War until he
was arrested for treason against the country. He had literally
done anything for Welcome to criminal Lea. I'm Maria Tremarki

(00:51):
and I'm Holly Fry. Heads up before we get started.
This episode includes some accounts of sexual assault. It also
includes a lot of other atrocities and cruelty. If you
have ever read the book The Manchurian Candidate, you came
across Barria's name. He has mentioned in Richard Condon's nineteen
fifty nine novel when the brainwashed character of Raymond Shaw

(01:14):
is described as quote the perfectly prefabricated assassin as quote
this dream by Laventi Barrier honestly as frightening as the
premise of that book and the subsequent film is it
is downright gentle in comparison to the real world activities
of Barrier. He was born on March twenty nine, eight

(01:36):
ninety nine, in the region of Georgia, which was then
part of the Russian Empire. The country of Georgia was
annexed to Russia in eighteen o one, and it remained
part of the Empire until nineteen eighteen, just about when
Barria was becoming an adult. The Kutais governor roughly corresponds
to present day emerity in Republic of Georgia. So that's

(01:59):
all just to kind of get at your bearings. Barria
was the son of a landowner named Pavel Kukevich Bria,
and many accounts of his life described his mother as
a very religious woman who gave her son a strict
religious upbringing in the Georgian Orthodox tradition. He identified as Mingrelian,
that's an indigenous Carvelian speaking ethnic subgroup of Georgians. Arrius

(02:23):
studied engineering and in nineteen nineteen graduated from the Baku Polytechnicum,
which was replaced by the Baku Polytechnic Institute very soon
after in nineteen twenty and if you're curious about it. Today,
it's now known as Isserbaijan Technical University, which is in
the Independent Republic of Isserbaijan. While at Baku during the

(02:45):
Russian Revolution in nineteen seventeen, Barria joined the Bolshevik faction
of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which a year
later continued under the shorter name of the Russian Communist Party.
During his lifetime, it would also become known as the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union and grow to be
the majority political party in the Union of Soviet Socialist

(03:07):
Republics or USSR. Barria was active in counter intelligence and
revolutionary activity from his very early involvement. Barria may be
most remembered as the executor of Joseph Stalin's terror, including
the Great Purge of the nineteen thirties. He did that, yes,
but he did a lot more than that. He was

(03:30):
in charge of the Soviet secret police. During the end
of the Great Purge, he led executions referred to as
liquidation of the officials who had carried it out. Those
were his peers and his colleagues. The vast network of
labor camps, known to historians as the Goo Lag archipelago

(03:50):
or under his command. He was also the administrative political
director of the Soviet Atomic Energy Project. This man had
his hands in rething. American historian and biographer of the
Soviet Union and Russia, Amy Knight, has described Area as
a hugely ambitious, sadistic, and arrogant administrator. Physically, he was

(04:15):
bald and bespectacled, and he has been described as paunchy.
He was intelligent and intriguing and cynical, and was a
skilled leader who could get people to follow him. He
was known to be violent, brutal, and to use ruthless measures,
including kidnapping, torture, rape, all the way up to murder.
According to an account in The Washington Post from various

(04:37):
Sadism has been described as going beyond the purges and
goulogs to include such crimes as assaulting women, some of
whom he may or may not have kidnapped, from the
streets around the city. There was one story I remember
reading when we were doing our research where he would
just drive around the streets in his car and choose
a woman Barria. It's said in hand told one victim

(05:01):
quote scream or not, it doesn't matter. You are in
my power now. He raped women and then quite literally
threw them back out to the street, usually after shooting
them dead. British historian Simon sebag Montefiori has written of
Barrier quote, he was witty, a font of irreverent jokes,

(05:23):
mischievous antecdotes, and withering put downs. He managed to be
a sadistic torturer as well as a loving husband and
warm father. But he was a preapic womanizer whom power
would distort into a sexual predator. Barria was brutal, and
he was also ambitious. Quote show me the man, and

(05:45):
I'll show you the crime was his infamous boast. He
was known to find his target first and then fabricate
a guilty story to fit the conviction he desired. He
sabotaged the interests and positions of his peers, and his
methods led him to become head of the All Russian
Extraordinary Commission for Combating counter Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage or CHECA,

(06:10):
which was an early Soviet secret police agency and the
forerunner of the KGB, while he was still in the
early days of his career. In his early twenties, he
personally oversaw regional political purgase in the Soviet Transcaucasian or
South CAUCUSUS Republics. Those were the nominally independent Soviet republics

(06:30):
of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. In ninety six, Sergo Janakiza,
the head of the Soviet Communist Party in that region,
introduced him to fellow Georgian Joseph Stalin, and then his
career really took off. Stalin was the dictator of the USSR,
he was a Bolshevik revolutionary, and he was the leader

(06:52):
of world communism at that time in history. Stalin Andvaria
became fast and close friends and impress with Barria. Stalin
promoted him to a position that moved the up and
comer from the Soviet Transcaucasian Republics to Moscow. Barrio was
appointed to deputy to the chief of the Soviet Secret
Police of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, better known

(07:16):
as the n k v D. Not long after his move,
Barria orchestrated and carried out the execution of n k
v D chief Nikola Yazov, and then he assumed his
predecessor's position, a position he held from eight until nineteen
fifty three. So was Yazov's murder done under Stalin's order, maybe,

(07:37):
but with Barria's reputation maybe not Under order of Stalin,
and under Yazov's command. While he was still alive, Barria
led the Great Terror That was a series of campaigns
intended to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party. Along
with his political and military rivals, Stalin also cast his

(07:58):
net to include artists, physicians, scientists, and really anyone that
he considered a threat. He had essentially launched a campaign
of political terror against the very people who put him
in power, members of the Communist Party. So you might
be wondering why the turn boiled down. Historians believe the

(08:19):
pretext for his murder campaign was the assassination of his
colleague and potential political rival, Sergey Kirov. A year or
two after Stalin's death, Nikita Krushchev more than hinted but
didn't make it a statement of fact that Stalin himself
was the one who had arranged Kirov's murder as a
way to garner support for his purges. Stalin wanted to

(08:43):
purge former high ranking Communists from power, and that meant
those in Central Party leadership, Old Bolshevik's government officials and
regional party bosses. But you might be wondering these people
were also communists, so what's up? Dalin was intent on
shaping his party under his rule and in his way,

(09:08):
and as they had been part of the former leadership,
they all had to go. The estimates of how many
were murdered very but most experts land on these numbers.
Roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand people were executed, and
more than one million additional people were sent to forced
labor camps known as goologs. Barria greatly expanded the goolog

(09:29):
system while he was in charge of these camps, and
used to tell his prisoners that he would quote, let
you rot in the camps will turn you into camp dust,
said former prisoner Anton Antonov of Zenyenko quote. The goologs
existed before Barrier, but he was the one who built
them on a mass scale. He industrialized the goolog system.

(09:52):
Human life had no value for him. Three widely publicized
show trials, as well as a series of closed door,
unpublicized trials, were held during the purges, in which many
people of political prominence were found guilty of treason and
either executed or imprisoned. Confessions in these cases had all

(10:14):
been made under intensive torture and intimidation. Many of the
accused had actually been innocent of any crime, and the
charges against them had been fabricated by Barriers and KVD.
The trials were away to eliminate quote suspicious party members,
and during that time numerous massacres, deportations, and other atrocities

(10:37):
took place under barriers orders. He once said, quote anyone
who attempts to raise a hand against the will of
our people, against the will of the party of Lenin
and Stalin will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed. With Russian
scientists Grigory Maronovsky, Barria had access to or perhaps co
led a secret poison laboratory in the heart of Moscow

(11:01):
between the years nineteen thirty nine to nineteen fifty one,
where he had access to all kinds of poisons, including
rice in and other highly poisonous chemicals and nerve agents,
and he tested those on political prisoners. Stalin called him
quote are Einrich Immler, So just in case you don't

(11:21):
know who that is. Heinrich Himler was a leading member
of the Nazi Party of Germany, second to Hitler himself,
and he was the main architect of the Holocaust. So
let's take a break for a word from our sponsor now,
and when we're back we'll talk about more horrors at
the hands of Barrier, including his work during the Second

(11:43):
World War. Welcome back to Criminally, in nineteen forty five,
just before the end of the Second World War, Stalin

(12:05):
put Barrier in charge of even more very important things.
The Soviet Union entered World War Two in June of
nineteen forty one with Operation Barbarossa, and it was dubbed
the Great Patriotic War by Russians, and Stalin gave Barrier
broad powers to monitor alleged desertion in the Red Army.

(12:26):
That power allowed him unconditional authority. He could execute men
as high ranking as generals if he considered them not
to be trusted. The perfect man for Stalin's orders, Barrier
had already in ninety nine, during the Finnish Russian Winter War,
thought up the following motto quote the Soviet soldier never retreats.

(12:47):
And with that he oversaw thousands of executions within the army.
And he was proud of that work. And we'll talk
about that more after his arrest during World War Two.
As a member of the State Defense Committee, Barria controlled
the Soviet Union's internal security system and he also oversaw

(13:07):
raw materials production through the Gulags. He used the millions
of people imprisoned in the gulag system as free labor
to carry out major domestic responsibilities in the war effort.
He took control of production of armaments, aircraft, and aircraft engines,
and he turned his labor camps into wartime production machines.

(13:30):
Barrio was appointed as a Marshal of the Soviet Union,
that was the highest military rank of the country. On
August seven, Stalin appointed Barrier to head the Soviet atomic
bomb project, and this was just one day after the
United States detonated their code named Little Boy uranium bomb
over Hiroshima. Neither Stalin nor Barria were known to trust people.

(13:53):
This is not a surprise to anyone I think listening
to this, and this is in general, not just on
this project, and they both distrusted the scientists working on
their country's first nuclear device. Barria was notorious for his
effective management abilities. He demanded an environment of total secrecy
and created an unrelenting sense of terror for those working

(14:15):
on this project. He had ordered constant surveillance on everyone involved,
and the two men Stalin and Barrio, were especially suspicious
of Igor Kurchata, the nuclear physicist who was scientific director
of this project. Barria, as both the political director of
the project and chief of the secret police, created a

(14:36):
special department within the n k v D known as
Department S. Department S existed to consolidate ongoing atomic research
and development efforts. That dual role gave him access to
intelligence collected from Russian spies, specifically intelligence on the Manhattan Project,
the team that researched, developed, and produced the first nuclear

(14:59):
weapons the United States. There is a lot to talk
about in regard to Barrier spies in the atomic bomb project,
but we're not going deep into that for this episode. However,
there is one salacious story from the memoirs of a
man under barrious leadership who claimed that the Soviets had
turned American physicist Jay Robert Oppenheimer, considered the father of

(15:23):
the atomic bomb, and had received a great amount of
information from him to build their own atomic bomb. True
or not, it is the kind of story that could
be true when it comes to Barriers leadership and his
ability to get information out of people. On August Soviet
scientists tested their first plutonium implosion bomb, code named First Lightning.

(15:49):
Julie Caratan, prominent Russian physicist and a leading scientist in
the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons program, wrote of Barrier quote,
this man personified evil in the country's earned history and
possessed at the same time tremendous vigor and efficiency. It
was impossible not to admit his intellect, willpower, and purposefulness.

(16:10):
He was a first class manager, able to bring every
job to its conclusion. After the successful detonation of the
soviets first nuclear device, though various severe and iron fisted
methods began to become unpopular, and he was becoming a
person of suspicion within the Kremlin. And with that suspense,

(16:32):
we're going to take a break for a word from
our sponsor. When we're back, we will talk about how
Stalin's deaths marked some huge changes in various life. Welcome

(16:54):
back to Criminalia. Let's talk about Stalin's death and how
it turned very world upside down. On March five, nineteen
fifty three, having been in power and pursuing a reign
of terror since nine, Stalin died at his home after
suffering from what was likely a major stroke. There are

(17:16):
some reports that suggest that it was a massive heart attack,
and there are also some that suggests that perhaps he
had actually been poisoned, and perhaps he had been poisoned
by Barria. Baria, along with three other Soviet politicians and
close associates of Stalin, Georgie Malinkoff, Yaslav Molotov and Nikita Krushchev,

(17:38):
became the deputy prime ministers after Stalin's death. Barria also
became head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an organization
which at the time combined both the secret political and
regular police functions. When Molotov met him, he described him
as a quote most clever man who was inhumanely energy

(18:00):
addict and could work a week without sleep. But Stalin's
death led to a power struggle among these men, during
which Baria attempted to use his position as chief of
secret police to seize power and become sole dictator of
the USSR, or at least that's what his fellow deputy
prime ministers feared was his plan. It turned out they

(18:22):
weren't wrong. While accounts of what exactly happened after Stalin's
death very considerably, specifically, what happened to Barria and in
the greater picture of the U S s R S leadership.
Most historians believe that Barrier's downfall was actually engineered by
his longtime colleague Nikita Khrushchev, who was one of the

(18:42):
deputy prime ministers as well as secretary to the Party
Central Committee. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union was the executive leadership team of the
U S SR. Decades later, Krishtchev basically came right out
and admitted to torpedoing Barria. Krishev later recalled of his
former colleague quote, Barria and I started to see each

(19:05):
other frequently at Stalin's. At first I liked him, We
had friendly chats and even joked together quite a bit.
But gradually his political complexion came clearly into focus. I
was shocked by his sinister, too faced, scheming hypocrisy. Soon
after his transfer to moscowity atmosphere in the collective leadership

(19:27):
and in Stalin's inner circle took on an entirely different
character from what it had been before. It changed very
much for the worse. Barrier's downfall officially began when Krushchev
submitted a motion of no confidence in Barria. To the
Central Committee led by Malenkov, Molotov and Khrushchev. This motion

(19:48):
was passed, and various hopes to settle into dictatorship were
defeated by what was an anti Baria coalition. A ruse
was organized for his arrest. On June three, sixteen weeks
and one day after Stalin's death, he was summoned urgently
to a meeting at the Kremlin by his colleagues, but

(20:10):
this wasn't a real meeting. Khrushchev launched an attack on Barria,
accusing him of being a cynical careerist who was quote
long in the pay of British intelligence and no true
Communist believer. Barria reportedly caught off guard, asked what this
fury unleashed against him was all about. Kristef assured him

(20:31):
that he would soon find out and immediately started a
motion for Barria's instant dismissal. But before that vote could happen,
the committee signaled, and it's reported that this signal was
a bit premature. Marshal Zukov and a group of armed
officers from a nearby room. Barria was arrested and taken
to a specially guarded cell within the Kremlin. He was

(20:55):
later sneaked out and taken to the Laforta Vaux prison.
Subsequently was moved to the headquarters of General Moskalenko, commander
of Moscow District Air Defense, where he was imprisoned in
an underground bunker. He was stripped of his government and
party posts, and he was publicly accused of being quote
an imperialist agent and of conducting quote criminal, anti party

(21:19):
and anti state activities. Roman Rudenka, an experienced prosecutor well
known to Krushchev, was appointed to make certain that Stalin's
former right hand man was expeditiously, tried, condemned, and executed
with the maximum appearance of legality. An interesting turn of phrase.
There By charging a man like Barrier with treason against

(21:42):
the USSR, the new regime was basically asking Russians to
believe that, for the past twenty plus years, their security
and more recently, their atomic energy program, was controlled by
a quote morally depraved man and his gang of quote
criminals who were really bourgeois capitalists in red revolutionary clothing.

(22:04):
Five months after his arrest, the Kremlin announced that Barrier
had confessed to the quote most serious crimes against the state.
He had not added state controlled Radio Moscow, he would
face trial quote at a special sitting of the Soviet
Supreme Court. That part was true, according to the Kremlin

(22:25):
in Tiflis, the capital of various home state quote, the
entire Georgian people condemned him as a traitor for sewing
poisonous seeds of distrust of our great brother Russian people.
That might have been true, just as well might have
been propaganda. The Kremlin published a list of barriers alleged accomplices.

(22:45):
It was kind of a who's who of the Communist
Party's secret police. Named with him were six ministers in
generals in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and they stood
trial on charges of high treason. They were all of
cabinet rank, and they included the following men. Bogden Kobolov,
Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia, Pavel meshik An

(23:09):
NKVD department head and Minister of the Interior in Ukraine,
Lev Baladsmirski, the major General in charge of the Ministry
of Internal Affairs, and their quote vitally important matter section,
Vladimir di Chanazov, Minister of the Interior in Georgia and
Soviet ambassador to Berlin during the period of the Nazi
Soviet Alliance, Sergei Goklidze, Ministry of Internal Affairs, head of

(23:33):
the Siberian Regions, and zevlod Mirkolov, the Ministry of Internal
Affairs number one spy catcher. According to the official indictment
against him, Area began quote betraying the Soviet Union more
than thirty years before his arrest. In fact, it went
back to his alleged activities in nineteen nineteen in Baku,

(23:58):
where the report claimed he had quote carried out secret
agency duty under the control of British intelligence. It claimed
he quote planted spies throughout the Soviet bureaucracy, and that
he had used quote slander, intrigues, and various provocations against
honest government workers who were an obstacle to him. He

(24:19):
was accused of assassinating Sigo or Jena Kidze. We mentioned
him earlier as the man who introduced Barrier to Stalin.
There are accounts, though, that Stalin also didn't trust Sirgo
and wanted him killed. So the plan of Barria or
the plan of Stalin, we can't be sure. Cigo reportedly

(24:39):
quote felt a distrust toward him and had accused Area
of quote wreaking vengeance on his family. The indictment included
additional murder charges and read quote that the plotter Barrier
carried out terrorist murders of persons from whom they feared exposure.
In this way, Barria put to death Ms. Cadroff, a

(25:01):
member of the Communist Party since nine two. At his trial,
the prosecution accused Barrier of quote spying for imperialist reactionaries,
resuscitating remnants of bourgeois nationalism, and of quote sabotaging the
Soviet farm program. That might seem like a random addition

(25:22):
to the list, but it happened to be under the
control of Khrushchev, the man who had had Barria arrested.
There were three very specific things about how barriers treason
trial had to play out according to those overseeing it. One,
the case had to be heard without the participation of
the party, so Barria was not going to be present

(25:43):
at his own trial. Two sentences to the highest degree
of punishment were to be carried out immediately, so if
he was sentenced to death, he was going to be
executed that same day. And three an appeal against the
sentence and titians for pardon were absolutely not to be admitted.

(26:04):
Barrier wrote letters while he was imprisoned in awaiting trial.
He wrote to his former fellow deputy prime ministers. To Krischeff,
he wrote, quote, I always saw you as an excellent
bolshevik and comrade, as I said before, and I told
comrades doalin when I could. He wrote to colleagues. He panicked, quote,
they want to shoot me without a trial, he wrote

(26:26):
on the sixth day of his imprisonment, and he was right.
They did want to shoot him without a trial. He wrote, quote,
I beg you to interview an at once, or it
will be too late. Just telephone them. He cited the
murder of thousands of people who fled the country during
World War Two as one of his heroic and patriotic deeds,
saying quote, I have always given all I could to

(26:48):
my work. I did the job of stopping retreating troops.
And he referenced the quote tens of thousands of fleeing
soldiers shop under his order. I only lived to make
our country powerful and great, he said. What he's referencing
here has been since described as one of the most
chilling episodes of his career, and we mentioned it briefly earlier.

(27:11):
Under a crushing Nazi attack in one during the Second
World War, Barria ordered his NKVD agents to shoot all
Red Army soldiers who retreated, and that was a shoot
to kill order, no matter what rank. More than thirty
thousand Red Army officers were executed, and to put that
number into context, that's three out of five marshals and

(27:32):
fourteen out of sixteen Red Army commanders. But his letters
did not help his situation. In December, six months after
his arrest at the Kremlin on charges of being a
quote imperialist agent, barrious trial went ahead. Is planned I
witness accounts, which were published in a weekend supplement of

(27:53):
the daily newspaper is Vestia, provided details of the treason
trial of the quote Kremlin monster. Barria refused to plead guilty.
He went on an eleven day hunger strike before he
was tried. General Moskelenko was quoted as saying we had
to bend our efforts to make sure the villains survived

(28:14):
to face trial. Barrio was convicted of treason against the
USSR on December twenty three, ninety three, and was immediately
executed by shooting on the orders of Khrushchev. He may
have refused to admit any guilt, but in front of
his executioner, he begged for his life. Recounting the scene
of his death, Olga Batitski, wife of Barrio's executioner, Marshal

(28:37):
Pavel Batitsky, said that her husband recalled how Barrio went
down on his hands and knees, begging to be spared.
Olga continued that this insulted my husband, and my husband said,
in all that you have done so loathsome mean and nasty,
can you not find enough courage in yourself to accept

(28:57):
your punishment in silence. The trials for the six men
who had controlled the secret police of the Soviet Union
for decades with Barria took place between December and December
twenty ninette. All of those men were shot immediately after sentencing.

(29:18):
So wow, on this episode, it's like meeting the devil.
It's a very dark one. It is one of our
darker ones. Um, would you like to have a drink
with me? I do, and I cannot help but history
ng up this particular perfecty poor. One of the things

(29:45):
that I couldn't help but think about a lot as
I was reading. This was Russia's relationship with alcohol, which
is very fraught in many ways. So in the late
nineteenth century, Russia had such a crisis of alcoholism that
it really kneecapped the labor pool, and like the country

(30:07):
was suffering because people couldn't work, and that actually led
to this reactionary start of temperance activism. Zar Alexander the
third had ignored things for a long time until they
just got way too bad. He was himself a big drinker,
but he then limited the production of vodka, and he
put quality regulations in place for vodka production, and he

(30:29):
started programs to promote the idea not of abstinence, but
of drinking just in moderation, because at that point it's
culturally so much part of the country that like you
couldn't just say no, we're not doing that anymore. And
the state, as part of this, also started these programs
to like keep people busy and entertained that we're not drinking,
so you could go to the theater for free, or
you could go to a music concert for free. All

(30:51):
of these things they started offering, like free adult education
classes and like leisure incentives. Basically none of this worked
at all. By the way, there were still illicit liquor sales,
and the sales that those included were of course non
regulated vodka that was being made by not carefully monitored stills.

(31:14):
Russian alcoholism cost the country so dearly that by the
time the Russo Japanese War happened in nineteen o four
in to nineteen o five, soldiers had so many drinking
problems that they actually lost battles, and it made Russia
very week when it came time to negotiate the treaties
that ended that conflict. When the Bolsheviks seized control of

(31:37):
the government in nineteen seventeen, alcohol was outright outlawed. Five
years later, when the Soviet Union was established, they could
have mild alcoholic drinks, but they were way lower proof
than what we would normally associate with vodka today. But
then in vodka was again legalized at normal proof, which
is around forty a b v. When Stalin gained power

(31:58):
in the nineteen thirties, he made a very interesting move,
which is that he had state run distilleries ramp up
production because they needed the revenue, even though he knew
this country had not solved its alcoholism problem, and that
he was damning some people to misery and death. He
was like, but we need the money really bad. I'm

(32:19):
telling you all of this because it serves as an
interesting backdrop. Right. This was all going on in various
formative years and then when he was in power in
his early career. So when you think about things like
him shooting soldiers on site if they tried to retreat,
it's born of that embarrassing episode where like soldiers had

(32:41):
not been able to manage themselves in a way that
put Russia in a very weak position. That's not to
justify it. I'm just explaining like the mindset where they're like, okay,
we have zero tolerance. Now if you want to run,
you're going to die. It's it explains that anti desertion,
anti retreat hardline that they took. Here is where I
try to turn this around and make it a little

(33:03):
bit more fun. Surprise, the US is the world's second
greatest consumer of vodka after Russia, and we're a tight
second because we have a whole culture around it that
is like fun. It's not only me, but I'm a contributor,
and I wanted to come up with a drink that

(33:26):
recognizes all of these things, but also sweetens it a
little bit in a way that reclaims some of the
places that are associated with Barrier in a better way.
The obvious drink here is a Moscow mule, although it
has its own history because it was not invented in Moscow.
It was invented in California at a bar called the

(33:50):
Cock and Bull because there was a man who had
bought the Smirnoff distribution rights in the United States regretted
that because nobody wanted to drink DKA. This was like
in the thirties when like Russia was considered not something
we wanted to be associated with. There was also similarly,

(34:11):
the owner of the Cock and Bowl restaurant had started
manufacturing ginger beer, which people also did it. So these
two men put their heads together again in California, were like,
what if we combine these things people don't like and
we market it in a new way and US and

(34:32):
we have the US has embraced the Moscow mules. So
I wanted to do the Moscow mule in a different
way since it isn't actually an obvious choice because it
is not from rock. But then I also wanted to
look at the country of Georgia and what they are
known for. And Georgia's greatest crop is grapes. So I'm

(34:54):
not the first person to do this, but we're going
to make a grape mule, and basically what you're going
to start with is between three and six grapes. I
like to cut them in half because I find them
easier to muddle that way. Listen, there may or may
not have been a little accident where I had to
press hard enough to break that meniscus of grape skin

(35:17):
and things went flying in my kitchen. I'm not saying
that happened, but I could see where it would your
leadership that might happen. So I like things pretty grape
b So I did five grapes, but anywhere in the
three to five and you're gonna muddle those, you can
be pretty aggressive with it. It's fine, you're not going
to strain them because you're actually going to retain that

(35:38):
grape pulp, and then it's just easy. You're building a
regular moscow mule. So that's an ounce and a half
of vodka. There are grape vodkas that you can use here,
and I have seen mules made with grape vodkas before.
But if you just want to go with a clean,
simple vodka, that's just as good. And then you're going
to do about three quarters of an ounce of lime juice.

(36:00):
This is this is one of those times where a
fresh squeezed lime is really gonna do you, right. I
will never bust anybody's chops about using the bottled squeezy
lime juice. I do it all the time, but this
is in a mule. There's a vast difference to my palette.
Get a fresh lime and then you're just going to
top it off with ginger beer, and then as you're drinking,
you'll mix it around with your straw or whatever. Whether

(36:21):
or not you use a copper cup, that's on you.
They're nice, but if you don't have one, you have
to buy one just for it. It does keep it
colder longer, which makes the flavor just feel smoother. So
that's our little mule. I am calling this sweeter than treason,
which is also just because it's hard to pull something
out of this story that isn't referencing something horrifying, because

(36:45):
terrible entire story is horrible. So it's nice to end
on a drink that's not coming from that. We wanna
make a nod to the country of George's incredible, great
production and have a Yummyjumi drink. The mocktail for this
is delicious in lieu of vodka. I used grape juice.

(37:06):
I went with low sugar. Otherwise, to me, it gets
very sweet. But that's a preference thing. Do it, however
you like, Keep those muddled grapes in there pouring that
ginger beer. If you are one of those people. I
know a few where ginger beer is just too bitey
for you. Yeah, and some of it depends on what
ginger beer you get, because different brands have very different

(37:27):
levels of ginger content. You can always use a ginger
ale here. That's fine, that's whatever. Listen, it should be
delicious for you. Always ginger ale in the fridge. Yeah, yes,
don't go out and buy more stuff, and you don't
have to. You can do that next time you're at
the store, grab some, but don't worry about it. And
that is sweeter than treason and hopefully takes the edge

(37:48):
of this truly horrifying story because he's important to talk
about these monsters in history, but not always fun and
They're going to come up when we talk about these topics.
We cannot avoid them. We hope as you sip this
it helps remedy the many yucky things we have caused
you to hear today, and that it makes you want

(38:10):
to come back and hang out with us again. Next week,
we'll be right here. There will be more treason, and
there will be more drinks. Criminalia is a production of
Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I

(38:32):
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows,