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