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On December 1st 1934 Sergei Kirov who was the leader of the Communist [Sergei Kirov appears ahead of Soviet flag]

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Party in the city of Leningrad was shot and killed in his office to this day no

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one knows who the murderer was but many people have tried to pin the blame for [Man blindfolded putting a pin in murderer of Kirov]

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the crime on Stalin why because of what happened next...

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Stalin used Kirov's murder as an excuse to go on a fishing trip and we're not

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talking about a few days of contemplatively standing in an icy [Man casting a fishing line]

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stream casting a line with a worm on it you know that we're sure he would have

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gotten a great Instagram out of that one... We're saying that Stalin went hunting

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for people to get rid of and he hooked several a series of show trials were

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conducted between 1936 and 1938 as a means of taking down the men Stalin had

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nabbed, several of the defendants and the Moscow trials were old friends of [Judge bangs gavel]

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Stalin's...Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, yeah those guys Russians had

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been two of the original members of Stalin's troika in 1923...Nikolai Bukarin

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had come aboard later and helped Stalin wrestle power from Leon Trotsky probably [Bukarin and Trotsky in a steel cage]

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in a steel cage match well Zinoviev and Kamanev were both executed in 1936

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Bukarin was executed in 1938 clearly friendship didn't matter much to Stalin

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if he saw he was a threat to his power which isn't the lesson we want to take [Boy being bullied on the bus]

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from this video but let's just leave that one behind moving on

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even with millions of people dying at Stalin's command in the Great Purge

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the Western world thought Soviet Russia was a pretty hip place, nobody bothered [People dancing at a concert]

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to listen to Leon Trotsky who was living in Mexico and telling anyone who would

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listen that Stalin was off his rocker nobody that is saved Uncle Joe himself

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who sent an assassin to do Trotsky in with an icepick to the head and so by [Assassin chases Trotsky with icepick]

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the end of the 1930s all of the old guard who had risen up through the ranks

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with Stalin were dead and buried there was no one left in Soviet Russia to

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threaten him beyond the western horizon however was a whole other story no not

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that story one of these days we'll end a video on a dramatic

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yeah like that....[Hitler appears]

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